Server 2012 Hyper-V Replication

     One of the most exciting new features of Server 2012 is Hyper-V Replication. This post will include a basic tutorial on getting that feature working. In my test setup I have a Server 2012 that was upgraded from Server 2008R2. This Server hosts a VM of my SBS2011 production server. The upgrade from Server 2008R2 vent very smoothly and it was nice to not have to start from scratch.
    The second Server 2012 was built from scratch and the only role added was Hyper-V. The method that I chose for authentication was Kerberos since both Hyper-V Hosts were member servers. After following the steps to enable replication for a particular VM everything I tried resulted in Authentication failure. Looking at the Hyper-V logs on both machines I found numerous event ID 14050 errors.
Failed to register the service principal name 'Microsoft Virtual System Migration Service'.
Failed to register the service principal name 'Microsoft Virtual Console Service'.
Failed to register the service principal name 'Hyper-V Replica Service'.
After searching for possible causes and solutions many of them listed in the following wiki http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/1340.hyper-v-troubleshooting-event-id-14050-vmms.aspx
I also made sure that I had at least one network adapter not being used by Hyper-V and made sure that I had Static IPs for all adapters with the proper DNS entered in their configuration. Still no success, I decided to add DNS and Directory Services roles to the primary Hyper-V Server. I did this for a couple of reasons, one being the fact that it always boots before my primary domain controller secondly I wanted another DNS server to allow Internet browsing when I have the SBS2011 VM down for any reason.
    Viola, Not sure why but my 14050 errors were gone on both 2012 servers, replaced by 14052 events stating successful registration of SPNs as well as 29290 events about updating of Firewall Rules. So onto replication!! The following screenshots show the basic process.

 

Right click on the machine that you want to replicate and select Enable Replication.

 

Click on specify Replica Server, browse and chose Server.

 

 

 Specify Replica Server Port and Authentication Method.

Chose VHDs to replicate, I unselected  a couple due to disk size and the fact that they weren't crucial to this test. Note... you can only make the choice when enabling replication. You can't add them later without starting the process over.

Chose recovery Points.

 Chose how to transfer initial image. I  chose send initial copy over the Network, all 500 gig of it. When to start the replication is also set here.

 Summary and click finish, hopefully no errors.

 At long last No Errors!!

 The VM shows up in the replication Server.

 Replication Status, Initial replication took only about 2.5 hours for 500 Gig. I was impressed.
I will be posting more on other features such as Failover.