Using Yintersync.NET to provide offsite Hyper-V disaster recovery for nothing (or cheap).

We provide small charities with IT systems and although many have reasonable set-ups, the area that
is often lacking is backup and disaster recovery.

In this case, our customer had a good but modest single server set-up and cloud based backup for most of their data. What was required was an easy and quick way to restore their following server.

Dell Poweredge T110, Windows 2012 Server Standard running 3 Hyper-V VM's.

• Windows 2012 R2 Domain & File
• Windows 2012 R2 Remote Desktop 
• Windows 2008 SQL

Budgets are very limited so we mostly used what they had for the set-up.

• Dell Vostro 230 (core2duo, 2gb ram, 250gb disk, win7)
• 2 x 2tb hard drives.
• Static IP address at backup destination.
• SSL Certificate.
• Somewhere to put it, in this case they had a secondary location.
• Consumer grade broadband.

We built the backup server with the following specifications.

• Windows 7 on the 250gb hard disk.
• Software mirror on the 2 x 2gb hard disks.
• Set-up previous versions at 5pm daily. (see guide)
• Install Yintersync.NET Server (free for non commercial use).
• Install the SSL certificate.
• Set-up appropriate port mapping on their router router.
• Set-up DNS to point to their static IP address.
• Set-up Yintersync.NET reporting to send daily emails to the CEO. (see manual).
• Seed the server with relatively recent copies of the VHD's.

All that was left to do was install the Yintersync.NET agent on their Hyper-V server, link it up and set a 6 pm schedule. (see manual). Easy.

This set-up took us about 2 hours work to put together and now the charity has the following.

• Automated overnight replica.
• Easy recovery; set-up the VHD's on a new Windows 2012 system.
• Roll-back using shadow copies of the VHD files.
• CEO gets a daily email to inform them their replica is OK.