Hi,

Is Hyper-V Live Migration compatible with Hyper-V Replica/Hyper-V Recovery Manager?

I have 2 Hyper-V clusters in my datacenter - both using CSVs on Fibre Channel arrays. These clusters where created and are managed using the same "System Center 2012 R2 VMM" installation. My goal it to eventually move one of these clusters to a remote DR site. Both sites are connected/will be connected to each other through dark fibre.

I manually configured Hyper-V Replica in the Fail Over Cluster Manager on both clusters and started replicating some VMs using Hyper-V Replica.

Now every time I attempt to use SCVMM to do a Live Migration of a VM that is protected using Hyper-V Replica to another host within the same cluster, the Migration VM Wizard gives me the following "Rating Explanation" error:

"The virtual machine virtual machine name which requires Hyper-V Recovery Manager protection is going to be moved using the type "Live". This could break the recovery protection status of the virtual machine.



When I ignore the error and do the Live Migration anyway, the Live migration completes successfully with the info above. There doesn't seem to be any impact on the VM or it's replication.

When a Host Shuts-down or is put into maintenance, the VM Migrates successfully, again, with no noticeable impact on users or replication.

When I stop replication of the VM, the error goes away.

Initially, I thought this error was because I attempted to manually configure the replication between both clusters using Hyper-V Replica in Failover Cluster Manager (instead of using Hyper-V Recovery Manager).

However, even after configuring and using Hyper-V Recovery Manager, I still get the same error. This error does not seem to have any impact on the high-availability of my VM or on Replication of this VM. Live migrations still occur successfully and replication seems to carry on without any issues.

However, it now has me concern that Live Migration may one day occur and break replication of my VMs between both clusters.

I have searched, and searched and searched, and I cannot find any mention in official or un-official Microsoft channels, on the compatibility of these two features. 

I know vMware vSphere replication and vMotion are compatible with each otherhttp://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-55/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.replication_admin.doc%2FGUID-8006BF58-6FA8-4F02-AFB9-A6AC5CD73021.html.

Please confirm to me: Are Hyper-V Live Migration and Hyper-V Replica compatible with each other?

If they are, any link to further documentation on configuring these services so that they work in a fully supported manner will be highly appreciated.

D

Did you ever find out about this? I'm having the same issue...

This can be considered as a minor GUI bug. 

Let me explain. Live Migration and Hyper-V Replica is supported on both Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 Hyper-V.

This is because we have the Hyper-V Replica Broker Role (in a cluster) that is able to detect, receive and keep track of the VMs and the synchronizations. The configuration related to VMs enabled with replications follows the VMs itself. 

If you try to live migrate a VM within Failover Cluster Manager, you will not get any message at all. But VMM will (as you can see), give you an error but it should rather be an informative message instead.

Intelligent placement (in VMM) is responsible for putting everything in your environment together to give you tips about where the VM best possible can run, and that is why we are seeing this message here.

I have personally reported this as a bug. I will check on this one and get back to this thread.

Update: just spoke to one of the PMs of HRM and they can confirm that live migration is supported - and should work in this context.

Please see this thread as well: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsazure/en-US/29163570-22a6-4da4-b309-21878aeb8ff8/hyperv-live-migration-compatibility-with-hyperv-replicahyperv-recovery-manager?forum=hypervrecovmgr

When can we expect an update for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 (R2)? It's frustrating that all rating recommendations are invalid when Live Migrating a Virtual Machine. How do we choose the best possible node? Does Dynamic Optimization even work?

Thank you for this. I have just finished adding Hyper-V replication to my Live Migration setup and was shocked when I tried to migrate to test the functionality of the new setup.