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Failed-over to a Standby VM Today. Minor Problems

So today we had to failover to one of our standby VM's due to it's physical counterpart suddenly dying. It went well for the most part but I did find a few things that hung me up.

The protected machine is (was) a Windows 2008r2 DC and our standby server runs 2012r2 Hyper-V.

Plan for the initial boot time. Booting, installing the services disk, network configuration and rebooting took probably 30 min at least.

Installing the integration services disk assigned the virtual optical drive the same letter as one of our mapped drives. I had to go into disk management and reassign them

Right away I noticed our mapped drives did not work so I had to reshare the data volume and remap it. Users then reported that all their files were "read only" so I had to go back and assign rights to the shared volume.

Fail back should be fun. I am thinking the server probably has a bad motherboard and the RAID array is OK. If it is I will simply do a live restore of the data volume from the newest backup as opposed to a BMR. Fingers crossed that the next scheduled backup runs w/o anything funky happening. I paused the export for the time being for obvious reasons.

I would love to hear any advice or feedback about the permissions and drive mapping issues.

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  • The live recovery thing on the data volume actually worked pretty well. The files written to the VM during fail over were immediately available to users in the most current form which was pretty cool. I just took a snapshot, shut it off, turned on the repaired physical and live restored the data drive. It is noteworthy to mention that both the volumes on the physical server were not harmed during failure. It was a bad motherboard.

    The physical DC had only been off for about 24 hours so replication with the other DC's should be fine. It is so far and I'll keep an eye on it.

    The only thing that sucked was exporting a new base image after it was all over. I assumed the reason was the exported VM is one volume and the physical machine is two. Oddly though two days later it is again taking a new base image. I'm not sure what that is about.
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  • The live recovery thing on the data volume actually worked pretty well. The files written to the VM during fail over were immediately available to users in the most current form which was pretty cool. I just took a snapshot, shut it off, turned on the repaired physical and live restored the data drive. It is noteworthy to mention that both the volumes on the physical server were not harmed during failure. It was a bad motherboard.

    The physical DC had only been off for about 24 hours so replication with the other DC's should be fine. It is so far and I'll keep an eye on it.

    The only thing that sucked was exporting a new base image after it was all over. I assumed the reason was the exported VM is one volume and the physical machine is two. Oddly though two days later it is again taking a new base image. I'm not sure what that is about.
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