Replicate SCVMM 2012 Clustered VMs using Hyper-V Replica & SQL Always-On

As one of the common scenarios for Disaster Recovery using Hyper-V Replica is to replicate System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) Virtual Machine (VM) while utilize SQL Server 2012 Always-On to replicate the SCVMM DB, however when SCVMM is implemented as high available (SCVMM Cluster), then some points should be considered to allow safe failover to replica datacenter without issues, in this blog post I will cover these points as follow:

VMM Cluster Quorum:

To able to cluster SCVMM VMs you will need to implement guest clustering, however if you decide to use shared disk quorum (which is the default supported quorum) then this will be blocking point to replicate SCVMM VMs using hyper-V Replica, so you should select one of two options:

· Wait for Windows Server 2012 R2 and use Shared VHDx as a quorum.

· Use File Share Witness (FSW) Quorum, which is working and supported for SCVMM cluster, in that case it is better to host this FSW at 3^rd datacenter.

VMM Cluster IP Address Resource:

The second point that need to be considered is the IP Addresses for both SCVMM Server and SCVMM Cluster Resource, VM IP Address can be injected easily from VM Failover IP Address properties when Hyper-V Replica is configured, however in case of failover if you just inject the VM IP Address to assign IP Address for SCVMM VM from replica site then VM will start and will able to login to domain but SCVMM Cluster will fail because IP Address resource is configured with IP Address from primary datacenter, and the work around I used to overcome this issue is to add another IP Address resource in SCVMM cluster as shown in the below screenshot.

Then configure Cluster Name resources for SCVMM cluster to depend on IP Address resource from primary datacenter “OR” IP Address resource from replica datacenter as shown in the below screenshot.

Then you need to test the replication using “Planned Failover” and remember to Failover SQL Always-On availability group as well to make the SQL instance at replica site as the active one.

Finally as a conclusion, it is very easy to replicate SCVMM 2012 Clustered VMs using Hyper-V Replica and SQL Always-On to Disaster Recovery replica datacenter and have it fully functional safely in less than one hour.