I never thought having a Hyper V replica server would ever come in handy as a life saver, when I was running a 3 Node cluster, however last night I can tell you that it saved my butt!  

I won't get into the specifics of how I lost a 3 node cluster, but you can say the SANs died.  So here is my predicament and I have read a lot of articles and posts over the last 2 hours and so far I can't find a solution to my problem.

Normally when the primary server is back you can do a reverse replication.  I have done it before in my disaster planning and testing, however after loosing the cluster, I lost my VM configuration. This means I can fail it back over to the parent cluster, because all of the roles are gone since I had to rebuild a SANs.  

I need to get the replica server's VMs back to my new cluster.  IT says specifically in the Microsoft "Manual" for HyperV replica "The Replica virtual machines must be replicated back to their original primary server. Do not attempt to configure replication from the Replica server to a third server."  per  Link here

Well the problem is that after rebuilding the cluster's SAN this is essentially a "3rd" server.  

So I tried "Moving" a VM to the first node and it works fine, however it still thinks it is in a fail over state it also have the snapshot.  I tried moving individual resources, however due to permission issues with the cluster I can't copy anything to a CSV from another server.  

Any suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated!

Jason

"Remove Replication" from the surviving replicas... this will merge all the snapshots and you'll be left with a solidified primary VM.

From there, re-enable replication back to the original (i.e. rebuilt) cluster.  Once that's settled, do a planned failover - a step in which will reverse the replication, effectively putting you back where you were.

The way I see it, there's no reason to preserve the replication status of the surviving VM (the replica) because its primary/source is now gone, so starting fresh seems the way to go.

// Similarly, I've been using replication to migrate VM's from a 2012 based cluster to a new 2012R2 cluster on newer hardware/storage.  I can replicate from 2012 -> 2012R2, but when I do the planned failover, the reverse replication fails b/c you can't replicate to a down-level version of Hyper-V.  However, I don't care at that point because the VM is where I need it, and the snapshots get merged once I "remove replication" from each "copy" of the VM.  Once I see the instance on the 2012R2 cluster boot, I trash the source instance... from there, I re-enable replication from the new primary to a new remote cluster as well, so I still end up with a replica to save my butt should things go sideways.

Good Luck!!

• Edited by DJG-JoshM 14 hours 43 minutes ago typo/grammar fix