Hardware failures, software bugs, human errors, and natural disasters can render your business-critical services or even entire datacenter unavailable. NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides a powerful way to recover from such failures. The Hyper-V VM 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 compute resources. In a disaster situation, you can simply power on the replicas for near-instant recovery.

Hyper-V VM Replication Features

Application and Databases Support

Since applications and databases constantly process data in the RAM, it is not enough to just make a copy of the data that is stored on a VM disk. NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides the Application-Aware mode, which ensures that the data in replicated VMs running applications and databases such as Exchange, Active Directory, SQL, are consistent.

Application-aware Backup and Replication

When you back up a VM that runs Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, SQL Server or any other application/database, it is critical to ensure that the data inside those application and database backups is consistent. This is important because portions of data are kept in memory and some transactions may be incomplete when the VM backup is made. If no actions are taken to flush memory and I/O operations, such backups would be crash-consistent, that is, an equivalent of pulling the server plug and then powering it back on. Of course, most modern applications and databases provide ways to recover from such a state, but in most cases you’d still need to waste time on manual restore operations and run a risk of losing data.

To ensure that your application and database data is consistent, NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides the application awareness feature. To perform consistent backups and replicas of Windows-based VMware and Hyper-V VMs, NAKIVO Backup & Replication relies on the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) service running inside VMs. What if your application is not VSS-aware or runs on Linux? NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides the ability to run custom pre-freeze and post-thaw scripts to enable application-consistent VM backup and replication. A pre-freeze script is executed before a snapshot of a VM is taken, and post-thaw script is executed after the snapshot has been taken.

With the application-awareness feature is turned on, your backups and replicas will contain consistent application and database data, without performing any extra configuration steps. As a result, you can not only instantly recover VMs, but also instantly Microsoft Exchange objects (such as emails), and recover Active Directory (such as users), directly from a compressed and deduplicated backup repository

Forever-incremental Replication

All VM replication jobs are forever-incremental, which means that only initial replication creates a complete copy of a source VM. Later on, 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 VM replica, and you can use Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS) scheme to rotate recovery points on a daily, weekly, monthly, or 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)

Initial Hyper-V VM replication may be time and bandwidth consuming because a VM itself might be huge. To speed up this process and offload your network, you can perform a staged replication. This means that you make the initial VM replication onto a removable media, and then move those replicas to a new location.