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Are there any software solutions that will be able to handle replicating the data from one SAS based DAS (a Dell MD3200) attached to two R410 servers running clustered Server 2008 R2 Hyper V instances in a co location data center to another MD3200 attached to another two R410 servers running clustered Server 2008 R2 Hyper V instances that are in our office so that in the event that the data center goes down it is simply a matter of turning on the VMs in our office and the VMs are able to start up as if they were a server that had been turned off without being shutdown?

I have recently seen someone doing something similar with HP’s left hand SAN offering and VMWare where they were able to have iSCSI endpoints clustered together and replicating across a WAN link so that if for some reason the data center became unavailable they could simply start up the VMs on ESX servers running in their local office and the only negative affect is that to the VMs it was like being turned off instead of properly shut down which most applications like SQL will handle without too much trouble.

I would like to do something similar but use DAS based storage instead of HP's Left Hand SAN and Hyper V R2 instead of ESX.

This blog entry indicates that Clustered Shared Volumes cannot be replicated but I was curious if there was third party software out there that can handle this.

Edit1: I am exploring the functionality of Double Take's Availability replication product but based on what I have currently seen it doesn't provide any indication that it can replicate clustered Hyper V instances, just normal ones.

Edit2: I have spoken with representatives from Double Take and their product does not support replication of Cluster Shared Volumes but I have discovered that Microsoft's Data Protection Manager 2010 does support backing up Cluster Shared Volumes.

Chris Magnuson
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At this point in time there does not appear to be any way to replicate cluster shared volumes used by Hyper V to store clustered VMs. If someone can find one then I will mark theirs as the answer.

EDIT: Bumped into this post and decided it was worth making an edit to the answer. It's 2018 and not 2010 now and there's a bunch of options these days. WS2016+ has built-in feature called Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) which comes with Datacenter edition and it allows replicating CSVs (actually virtual disks being CSVs' back end storage).

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/storage-spaces/storage-spaces-direct-overview

There's also Storage Replica which is more of a disaster recovery (DR) solution but it can also be put into use when there's a need to deploy CSV replication. This feature required Datacenter edition also (there are rumors stripped down version of SR will be released as part of Standard with WS2019, but nothing is in stone yet).

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/storage-replica/storage-replica-overview

There are third-party tools like StarWind Virtual SAN (Free) that could be used to replicate CSVs as well. It works with Standard edition of Windows Server and even free Hyper-V Server.

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free

There are hardware ways to solve the issue as well. Hope this helps.

Chris Magnuson
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