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Lastly, we have Storage Replica.

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And Storage Replica is a disaster recovery solution,

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again, baked directly into Windows Server,

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where you can replicate entire volumes between servers or clusters.

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And you can configure that replication to be either synchronous or asynchronous.

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Synchronous means that every write operation on the primary won't be

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committed until it's committed on the secondary.

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This method assumes that you have a low latency network

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to be able to support that; otherwise,

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you're creating a blocking situation on the primary

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server or the primary cluster.

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If you want to risk potential data loss,

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you can do asynchronous Storage Replica,

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and this is data mirroring across, again,

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the use case is across a higher latency link.

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And the main business cases for using Storage Replica are,

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for instance, in failover clustering,

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you can do a stretched or replicated cluster,

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or you can just create redundancy for server storage.

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Microsoft says in their docs that the server‑to‑server Storage

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Replica idea could be used as a replacement,

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where you might have in the past used the distributed

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file system or DFSR replication.

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Storage Replica represents a way to do that, perhaps in a more streamlined way.

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I would say that Storage Replica in Windows Server is roughly

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analogous to the high availability ideas we have in Azure VMs with

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availability sets and availability zones.

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But note that all of this stuff that we're learning about in

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this lesson deals with Windows Server,

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regardless of whether we're in Azure or on‑prem.

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I mean, in Azure, you can mount disks.

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I've shown you how to do that previously.

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You can mount VHD files to your Azure VM,

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and then you sign into your VM, and you can initialize and format,

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create volumes with or without storage spaces.

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So the stuff we're learning here,

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although it seems like it's all Windows server on‑prem,

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you can implement this stuff in the cloud too.

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Of course,

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the cloud gives you extra options beyond what you

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get within the operating system.

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Let me show you three topology diagrams.

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Again, the attribution in the Microsoft Docs is in the lower, left corner.

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The idea is you could use Storage Replica within a single cluster where

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you need high availability for an entire cluster,

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particularly using another site, say as a disaster recovery region.

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So we're synchronizing the shared storage in New York in this example,

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and we're able to configure automatic failover to New Jersey because that

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shared storage subsystem is synchronized via Storage Replica.

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Another idea is cluster‑to‑cluster.

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Now this is where you've got two separate clusters,

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and maybe your Los Angeles cluster is your production one and Las

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Vegas is being used for test and development.

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You see what I mean?

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This does not support automatic failover,

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but you could do a manual failover if you wanted to.

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And lastly, independent of a failover cluster,

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you can always configure server‑to‑server Storage Replica,

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where you're replicating a volume from one machine to another.

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Notice that we're using the Server Message Block protocol.

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Now, the exam doesn't get into the networking and all of that and prerequisites.

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We're not going to go real deep on this.

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I'm going to do a demo of Storage Spaces and Storage Spaces Direct,

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but all I'm going to do with Storage Replica is give

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you what you need for the AZ‑800.

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And the main thing there is just understanding from a high

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view how you set up that replication.

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Now, in terms of tools to do this, you've always got PowerShell,

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that's what I'm going to show you,

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but you also can do Storage Replica in Windows Admin Center.

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I'm showing you some PowerShell here for two reasons.

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One, it's a primary way to configure Storage Replica.

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And number two,

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I want to remind you that you do need to know PowerShell to

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be successful on your AZ‑800 and AZ‑801 Windows Server

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Hybrid Administrator certification.

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And it's, I would say, an intermediate level of PowerShell.

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On the first line,

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I'm creating a variable called Servers that references my two nodes.

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This, again, is going to be outside of a failover cluster,

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just singleton server to singleton server volume replication.

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And then I'm using the PowerShell pipeline to do a ForEach loop,

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installing the appropriate Windows features.

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We'll need Storage‑Replica, FS‑FileServer, and we'll need to restart.

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Once we come back from the restart,

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we can test to make sure that these two servers,

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or clusters if you're doing cluster replica,

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support the volume replica feature.

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So we've got Test‑SRTopology,

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and you notice here that we've got the Source and DestinationVolumeName.

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In this code, I'm using v as the mount for that.

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But notice there's a Source and DestinationLogVolume,

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and that's, I'm denoting l.

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Note that you're going to have to have a separate

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volume to track transaction log entries.

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This is a transaction based, whether you're doing synchronous or asynchronous.

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The log volume should very much be solid state.

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This is directly from the Microsoft Docs because the

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replication for it to succeed,

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you need those entries shipped to the

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DestinationLogVolume as quickly as you can.

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So the log volume doesn't have to be huge.

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Eight gigs, I think, is the default log volume size.

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And remember, if you're using Storage Spaces,

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you can easily create tiered storage and create a right‑sized log

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volume for each source that you want to replicate.

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That's the test.

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And assuming that works,

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you then can use New‑SRPartnership to actually stand up the Storage Replica. Now let's do a demo and then wrap up.