With the Live Sync feature, you can perform incremental replication from a backup of a virtual machine (source VM) running on a Hyper-V server to a synced copy of a virtual machine (destination VM) on another Hyper-V server or on the Azure cloud. The Live Sync operation opens the destination VM and applies changes from the backups of the source VM since the most recent sync point.
You can configure Live Sync to initiate replication automatically after backups or on a schedule (for example, daily or once a week), without requiring any action from users.
If no new backups have run since the most recent Live Sync, then the Live Sync operation runs but does not replicate any data.
Benefits of the Live Sync Feature for Disaster Recovery
You can use Live Sync to create and maintain warm recovery sites for virtual machines that run critical business applications. Live Sync offers the following benefits for disaster recovery:
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The impact on production servers is minimized because Live Sync uses backup data to create replicated virtual machines instead of replicating the running VM. The backup operation collects virtual machine data in a single pass, and the Live Sync operation runs on backup infrastructure.
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Live Sync is hardware agnostic, so that you do not need to reproduce the original hardware environment at the recovery site.
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The recovery time objective (RTO), which is the time interval between a service interruption and the restoration of services from the recovery site, is the time that is needed to turn on the virtual machines at the recovery site. Automated validation and the ability to specify new network connections at the recovery site minimize the time that is required to turn on the virtual machines.
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The recovery point objective (RPO), which is the time interval within which virtual machine data must be recoverable, is determined by the frequency of backups.
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You can copy backup data to a remote location where Live Sync operations are performed. To reduce the amount of data that is transferred over the wide area network (WAN), the Live Sync operation sends incremental updates to keep the source and destination VMs in sync, and the data transfer operation uses deduplication and compression.