One of the capability that I prefer most with Windows Server 2012 is Hyper-V Replica. Hyper-V Replica enables the replication of a Virtual Machine continuously from one Hyper-V host to another Hyper-V host. The replication can happen across different datacenters, across different domains (they don’t even have to be trusted) as Windows Server 2012 leverage the host network connectivity to carry the data to the replica.
The issue was that every time I started to talk about hyper-v replica, I was asked: how much bandwidth do I need between my systems ? And the answer is obviously “It depends”. It depends on how active is the VMs that you want to replicate. However we have made some simulation, collected data from multiple real life production machines and the team has been able to come up with a model.
Last week the product team has released the “Hyper-V Replica Capacity Planner”. It’s a free tool that helps system engineers to right size the network when they want to implement Hyper-V replica.
You can freely download the tool from this location : http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39057
Once downloaded, read the documentation and please run the capacity planner for a reasonable amount of time during the production hours so the data collected are relevant to what you want to achieve.
Enjoy the replication of Virtual Machines !