Architecture of Hyper-V Replicas/Clustering for redundancy?

[pmurphy]

Hi All,

I'm going to be taking on this project at the end of this week.

At the moment we unfortunately have just 1 single physical host Server running 2 X Hyper-V VMs (1 of which is the only DC) - This is a production Server and is business critical on many levels.

To protect the business against a hardware failure on our single production Server I have ordered a second identical server so we are covered in the event of hardware failure on either Server.

I have done a good bit of reading on here but would really appreciate expert advice on how to design this solution.

At the very least we need to be able to guarantee continuity with minimal downtime - It would be nice if the disaster recovery or failover was "seamless" or automatic also.

I am thinking that the DC and BDC functions should instead be installed on the physical hosts - ie non-VMs for reasons of simplicity and to avoid issues when recovering VMs? Or is this even necessary?

Where should Veeam B&R 9.5 be installed? In the case that either Server is non-operable does this mean Veaam B&R 9.5 should be installed on a 3rd system - we have a separate Windows 10 workstation? Is there an option to have it on a VM or directly on the each host Server but only start one at a time or similar? (Thinking of licensing here?)

Just to also mention - I also have access to a NAS but this is already in use for the usual Veeam nightly backups of the VMs and also Veeam Endpoint backups of key workstations in the business so space is somewhat limited.

[foggy]

I am thinking that the DC and BDC functions should instead be installed on the physical hosts - ie non-VMs for reasons of simplicity and to avoid issues when recovering VMs? Or is this even necessary?

It doesn't really matter but having an additional physical DC would allow for fully automatic virtual DC recovery.

Where should Veeam B&R 9.5 be installed? In the case that either Server is non-operable does this mean Veaam B&R 9.5 should be installed on a 3rd system - we have a separate Windows 10 workstation? Is there an option to have it on a VM or directly on the each host Server but only start one at a time or similar? (Thinking of licensing here?)

In case of replication scenario it is recommended to install Veeam B&R on the target side (or any third server) to allow for automatic failover through Veeam B&R console. It doesn't matter whether it is installed on a VM of the host itself.