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We have a Hyper-V cluster running 5 virtual terminal servers using HA.

We need to be able make this system redundant and so if this site was to fail our users could log into the backup system at another location and access their data via the terminal servers.

Any ideas?

We were thinking of maybe using a NAS which replicated the data to the other location in real-time(pass-through disks)? and having a similar Hyper-V cluster setup in the backup location. However we would need to create the users in both location and create a virtual mirror without the data ie applications, directories, settings etc.

Is this the best way to achieve this? We have read that using Hyper-v pass through disks is a big performance de-grade.

Aaron Friel
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Adam Chetnik
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I would not be concerned with the performance of various Hyper-V disk settings, they are all coming very close to the performance of physical disks.

Have you looked at a product like Steeleye for setting up a Hyper-V cluster? With this you could "geo-cluster" the VMs asynchronously to the other location. I think other products are available for doing this as well.

Alternatively you could transition to roaming profiles for the remote desktop services users, and make that highly available, but I don't know how you could fail over the servers users would connect to with remote desktop.

Aside from that, every SAN manufacturer and their mother seems to offer a wide area network synchronization option. See about running your Hyper-V cluster on that, and it solves your problem.

Short version: Use profile synchronization, software or hardware virtual machine synchronization to obtain your high availability objective. I would not place my trust in a NAS and some sort of file-copy or real-time filesystem synchronization. For a cluster to work well and automatically, you really want block-level synchronization with some hardware or software support for it.

Aaron Friel
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