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Business continuity with Hyper-V and SC Series
46 Dell EMC SC Series: Microsoft Hyper-V Best Practices | CML1009
8.2 Disaster recovery and disaster avoidance
Disaster recovery usually means reacting to an event that causes down time that takes place unexpectedly
with little or no warning. These events can be categorized as follows:
• Events that cause data loss such as malware infection, corruption, accidental deletion, sabotage, or
hardware failure of disks or disk arrays.
• Events that interrupt the ability to access data within or between sites, such as a network or power
failure (but no data is lost).
• Events that cause both loss of data and loss of access to a site, typically caused by more significant
and destructive events such as a fire or natural disaster.
Disaster avoidance implies having enough lead time to proactively react to an impending event, such as an
approaching hurricane, in a way that avoids or minimizes down time. This is the strategy commonly used
when doing system maintenance. An administrator may move a critical workload to an alternate location using
SC Series Live Volume before site maintenance at the main location causes an outage there.
A good business continuity plan will include both disaster recovery and disaster avoidance strategies that
leverage a combination of manual and automatic processes to address a wide range of possible scenarios.
• A manual process might be required to restore lost data from a backup or snapshot, or to bring a
Hyper-V guest VM on line at an alternate site. PowerShell might be used to automate manual steps.
• An automatic process kicks in on its own, such as when Live Volume with automatic failover moves
the primary Live Volumes to a secondary SC Series array.
8.3 Live Volume with Auto Failover for Microsoft
Live Volume is an optional SC Series feature that has been available for many years. Auto Failover is an
enhancement to Live Volume that has supported Microsoft Hyper-V since the release of SCOS version 7.1.
Working closely in conjunction with Live Volume, Dell Storage Manager can be used to create predefined DR
plans for Hyper-V environments.
To learn more about how LV-AFO can be configured to protect Microsoft clusters and Hyper-V (including
stretched clusters), see the Live Volume with Auto Failover for Support for Microsoft demo video (parts 1–3)
and the Dell EMC SC Series Synchronous Replication and Live Volume solutions guide.
8.4 Replay Manager for Hyper-V
SC Series Replay Manager is a GUI-based client/server data protection application that includes extensions
to support the creation of application-consistent backups for:
• Guest VMs in Hyper-V environments or in VMware environments
• VMware datastores
• Exchange or SQL Server data
• Local volumes on hosts and guests, when the Replay Manager agent is installed locally
Replay Manager also includes many PowerShell cmdlets to allow administrators to automate Replay Manager
operations that might otherwise require an administrator to be available after hours.
In Microsoft environments, Replay Manager leverages the power of the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy
Service (VSS) to create and manage application-consistent snapshots (Replays) of the protected hosts or
guest VMs and the workload. With application consistency, the host OS or guest VM OS, along with the