@JaredBusch said in Server and Storage Redundancy:
I disagree with how everyone here pushes starwind as this wonder answer. It is a great product, but Hyper-V replication works quite well for the SMB that only needs a single server compute node, yet wants to have some failover redundancy. It is simple, baked in, and no third party tools required.
I'll cross-post from SpiceWorks as I've been writing a Veeam Vs Hyper-V replica wrap up post recently and it's mostly what OP is asking here as well.
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You come up with a set of numbers:
- RTO (how much downtime you can afford?) and RPO (how much data you can lose?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_time_objective
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_point_objective
- Budget
So...
...if you can't afford much of a downtime and you can't afford to lose data you do implement some BC strategy: Windows failover cluster, HA VMs, FCI with SQL Server if you don't do AAG paying huge $$$ for SQL / Enterprise version etc and these would need HA storage (physical or virtual). Then you probably need some of our stuff (or some competitors, HP VSA is a good option if you care, upcoming Windows Server 2016 will have similar storage technology also if you'll go Datacente all-around and increase amount of licensed nodes). Most of these options are paid expect maybe self-made ones (you pay with your own labor), free 1TB HP VSA and also you can get free hyperconverged StarWind as well on a special request (search this forum there's a SpiceWorks path for that). This approach may add some $$$ requirements (+CapEx) and also for sure will make you work more to setup and support the final solution (+OpEx). <-- Do only if you REALLY NEED THIS !!
...if you can afford reasonable downtime (minutes, half of hour, hours maybe - time to recover your VM from some backup, depends on amount of data your VMs hold) and you can lose some data on manual failover or replication increment (again, some minutes typically) go w/out shared storage, run VMs from DAS but always use some good VM backup. Obviously Veeam is a good candidate for that. <-- Do this ALWAYS !! You can't run production w/out a backup solution !!
+ you need some backup storage and I don't see you mentioning you have one. You can't backup to yourself so cheap two-disk NetGear or maybe some off-site cloud space should help.
I don't recommend using Hyper-V Replica because it a) doesn't play nice with some apps officially (Exchange, SQL Server some scenarios, any VMs depending on each other) and b) steals IOPS from your system (twice as many writes now are needed, RAID10 is already half on writes so you get 1/4 of your disks so far, close to RAID5 write penalty now), and c) has dangerous "autofailover" option implemented with PowerShell script (see link below in P.S.), you really don't want to do that as there's no brain split issue protection, orchestration site should be a separate, say running in Azure but that's more $$$ and labor) d) make you think you're safe with VM replication while you really need a BACKUP. <-- Use Veeam Backup & Replication for both VM replication and VM backup, this money definitely pays you back.
That's it 
TL;DR: Don't buy StarWind unless you really need to and buy Veeam always.
P.S. In case you'll decide to implement a crazy "two Hyper-V hosts replicate to each other and here's my poor' mans pseudo-HA system" scenario here's a link for you:
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/keithmayer/2012/10/05/automated-disaster-recovery-testing-and-fa...
Again, I don't recommend doing that and there are reasons above why exactly.
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Perhaps it's safe to say that the closer you get to the kernel the more you need assembly?