Azure Stack HCI - Is Replication Needed?

[RichardParry]

Long time user of Veeam here, but with vmware only. Traditionally we'd replicate VM's from clusters to off-site replication servers (usually a server with local storage running vmware). Works great. However, as we everyone is having to jump ship from vmware due to the pricing, I am looking at MS Azure. We've already moved some small VM's into Azure Cloud, and currently using some lab hardware to test out a 2-Node MS Azure Stack HCI cluster.

Being a 2 node cluster it just mirrors the storage between both. My question is, is there still any need for a replication server, as such? A dedicated a box just for replica's? I've not explored it yet, but I assume it is possible to do a replication job from Azure Stack HCI on to a plain Hyper-V host? What's the normal/recommended practice here?

[Andreas Neufert]

For us the actual Azure Stack HCI is just another Hyper-V Cluster (same APIs/backup functions). So yes, you can replicate VMs to a Hyper-V server that support the same VM features. Think about VMware VM Hardware version compatibility.

Replication can be used for the same purpose as with VMware.
For DR.
Use normal restore if you can wait for the data processing to complete.
Use Instant Restore for 2min + boot timing for your critical servers. Performance depend on backup target disk performance mainly.
Use Instant Restore from Storage Snapshot or VM Replication (failover) to recover VMs with 1min + boot time with full speed of the production storage.

So it really depends on your SLAs and RTO requirements.

To give you an example:
Customer has 2000VMs.
100 of them are critical. From these 20 are databases with high load.
Customer replicate those 20 database systems in addition to backup.

In case of a restore, customer failover these 20 databases and start the 80 remaining servers with instant restore (multiple Repository server and backup targets). Then restore classically the remaining 1900VMs.

[william.bishop]

Are you married to the HCI style? Azure HCI isn't really cheaper than vmware, is why I ask. HyperV using traditional server/storage design can be much cheaper, as you already are paying for the microsoft tax once and once only.

[johan.h]

There's a lot of attention drawn to Hyper-V and Azure Stack HCI at the moment. Hyper-V should see a resurgence with Server 2025, as it is a major focus for that release. Azure Stack HCI is becoming more popular for remote and branch office sites - not as much yet in large scale enterprise deployments, but I have a feeling perpetual Hyper-V will be quite a bit more popular this year due to external factors.

Replicating from Hyper-V to AZSHCI is quite straightforward, making migrations easy. You cannot replicate back, because the VM version increases on the way into AZSHCI.
But remember there is Instant VM Recovery from any workload to Hyper-V and Direct Restore to Azure as well.

If you're happy with the level of resilience, and you already have storage mirroring, then replication may not be needed.
Also, having a dedicated server for replication may or may not be necessary really - but if you're using Veeam Backup and Replication - it needs to be deployed somewhere.