You need to ask yourself if the business can continue to run without critical data, applications, and operations. This will determine whether the business you are involved in needs a backup and disaster recovery plan or not. A firm yes is the only answer that indicates that you do not need a disaster recovery plan and you can skip this entire chapter. Let's face it, at some point your data will be at risk, disasters might occur and bring all the servers and services offline. Natural disasters, fire, flood, viruses, data corruption, human errors, and many other factors can make your entire system unavailable. Not having the proper precautions in place could mean losing it all.

Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V comes with tools and solutions to make sure that your virtual machines will be up, running, and available. Components, such as Failover Cluster, can ensure that your servers are accessible, even in case of hardware failures. However, clustering is not enough in case of a disaster.

In a Hyper-V environment, we have options to utilize the core components, such as Hyper-V Replica, for a DR plan that replicates your virtual machines to another host or cluster and makes them available in case the primary data center is offline; it even backs up and restores to bring VMs back, in case you lose everything.

This chapter will walk you through the most important processes for setting up disaster recovery for your virtual machines running on Hyper-V.