Hyper-V Replica to the Rescue!
Power outages are not infrequent where I live (something I find quite confounding – to be honest) and earlier this week we had an extended power outage and my Hyper-V servers were powered off uncleanly. When the power returned I had to sit down and make sure that everything came back correctly.
At first glance – everything looked good. My Hyper-V servers powered up happily and started up all the virtual machines. Hyper-V Replica reported that it was in a critical state – but it automatically scheduled resynchronization for all of my virtual machines. But as I was going through the virtual machines – I found a problem.
Something had gone wrong with my firewall.
I could not figure out what exactly was wrong – but it was using 100% CPU and not allowing any network traffic through. I shutdown the virtual machine cleanly and restarted it – but no dice. It still would not work. Thankfully, there was a simple solution.
I shutdown the misbehaving virtual machine and started up the replica version of it. This came up with no problems and started functioning correctly – as it had not been powered off uncleanly, Yay!
Now, there is a key point to make here: if I had performed a planned failover in Hyper-V (select the primary virtual machine and perform a planned failover) this would not have worked. Hyper-V would have copied across the outstanding (bad) changes and would have broken my replica virtual machine too. What I actually did was go straight to the replica virtual machine and selected to perform a failover (not planned). By doing this, Hyper-V did not copy across the latest data and everything worked.
At the end of this process I reversed the replication relationship and was good to go.
Cheers,
Ben