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We have two servers that run MS Hyper-V. I have one virtual machine that runs our Sage 50 accounting software. I want to create a duplicate VM on another physical server. This way if the one VM or physical server fails, access to Sage 50 can still be done.

However, how does the client know to connect to the VM that is still running at this point? Also, is there a way to ensure that data on one VM is replicated to the other so that no transactions are lost within the application?

There are 11 workstations that use Sage 50. They have a mapped drive, assigned by a GPO to connect to \SERVER-SAGE50-1

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You can set up Failover Clustering between the Hyper-V hosts (you'll need shared storage) so that a host failure won't affect VM's running on any particular host. If a host fails, it's VM's will be failed over to the remaining host.

In Hyper-V 3 (Windows Server 2012) there's a new feature called Hyper-V Replica that replicates a running VM to a "standby" (or replica) VM and will "failover" to the standby/replica VM if the source VM fails.

These two things together gets you both host and VM fault tolerance.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/failover-cluster-for-use-with-hyper-v-requirements.aspx

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We won't upgrade to 2012 for another year at the very least. Right now we have 2008 R2 Standard. I don't think it supports failover clustering. Only Enterprise and higher does. I could be wrong though. Also, Sage doesn't seem to let us keep the company data on a network drive unless the program is installed there as well. So something like DFS wouldn't work either. – Unplugme71 Nov 7 '12 at 15:27
Well then at the very least you can get host protection by using a Hyper-V failover cluster. A failure of either of the Hyper-V hosts won't affect the VM. You'll just need to figure out how to get VM level fault tolerance. – joeqwerty Nov 7 '12 at 15:29

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