Hyper-V Replication

Hardware failure, software bugs, human error, a natural disaster, or any of countless other events could suddenly render your business-critical services, or even an entire datacenter, unavailable.

The Hyper-V replication feature can create and maintain exact copies (replicas) of source Hyper-V VMs on a target host. The replicas are regular powered-off VMs, which don’t require any resources. In a disaster scenario, you can simply fail over to such VM replicas and continue your business operations as usual.

Hyper-V Replication Features

Application and Database Support

Since applications and databases constantly process data in memory, simply copying the data stored on disk is not enough. NAKIVO Backup & Replication features an Application-Aware mode, which ensures that applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Active Directory, and Microsoft SQL flush data from memory to disk before a replica is made. This guarantees that replicas are application-consistent.

Incremental Replication

By default, all Hyper-V replication jobs are incremental, which means that only the initial replication creates a complete copy of a source Hyper-V VM. For every job thereafter, the product detects changed blocks of data (increments) and merges them with the VM replica, leaving the previous state of the Hyper-V VM as a new recovery point.

Flexible Recovery Point Retention Policy

NAKIVO Backup & Replication can save up to 30 recovery points for each Hyper-V VM replica. You can use the Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS) retention scheme to rotate recovery points on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis. Recovery points are regular Hyper-V VM snapshots, so you can roll back to any recovery point even without NAKIVO Backup & Replication.

Staged VM Replication (Seeding)

The first Hyper-V replication may consume a lot of time or bandwidth, because the VMs, which might hold large amounts of data, need to be fully copied. To speed up this process and offload your network, you can perform a staged replication. This means that you perform the initial VM replication onto a removable media device, and then move those replicas to your target location.

Policy-Based Hyper-V Replication

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides advanced automation options for Hyper-V replication. You can create replication policies based on VM size, name, location, or other parameters. Once a policy is created, NAKIVO Backup & Replication scans your infrastructure and automatically adds new matching VMs to the scope of the job. Therefore, you no longer need to manually manage core data protection tasks and can rest assured that your important VMs are always protected.