SharePoint 2013: Notes on Hyper V and replication

Introduction

This posting is a work-in-progress for capturing and consolidating information on SharePoint 2013 vis a vis Hyper V replication as a disaster recovery solution. Generally, in reviewing these references, I have found that Hyper V replication is not a supported disaster recovery solution.

The primary reason being that SharePoint is an asynchronous distributed web application, in which servers are not entirely synchronized.  For example, a single timer job is executed at slightly different times on the different farm servers no matter how fast server network connections may be. Moreover, the replications of all farm servers will can never be fully synchronized, but will occur at slightly different times.

Lastly, the only supported disaster recovery options involve SQL Server and are these:

• Log Shipping
• Mirroring
• AlwaysOn

References

• Primary
• One of the cache hosts in the cluster is down
• Hyper V 2012 VM replication and SharePoint 2013 support
• Hyper-V 2012 VM replication as a Sharepoint 2010 DR solution
• Before you implement Hyper-V R2 replication; tips, tricks, does and dont’s
• Hyper-V Replica with SharePoint, Yes or No?
• Sharepoint 2010 and Hyper-V 2012 VM replication as DR solution
• Use best practice configurations for the SharePoint 2013 virtual machines and Hyper-V environment
• Hyper-V virtualization requirements for SharePoint 2013
• Hyper-V Replica Feature Overview
• Additional
• SharePoint DR strategies