Replication is a great way to keep the High Availability or your Disaster Recovery Plan with different ways base on your requirements
Software like Altaro Backup VM , Veeam Backup & Replication , Vembu BDR Suite , Acronis can give you the option to replicate your Virtual Machine offsite.
In previous article How to Configure Storage Replica in Windows Server 2019 explain a different way to replicate your Virtual Machines in another Site without need to use other Software. Note that the same steps can follow in Windows Server 2016.
In any solution that will follow the most important is how can monitoring efficient avoid disruption, downtime and get the advantage of the Replication when you will needed.
Today i would like to describe how can monitoring Storage Replica in Windows Server 2016 or 2019 to keep your reputation in case of a Disaster.
How can monitoring Storage Replica
We are ready for the most important step. The monitoring because we want to keep healthy the Replication and take advantage from this when we will have problems with the Production Server.
We don't want to create more problem or lose free hours to resolve replication problems.
Because your time is valuable find out different ways to monitoring Storage Replication.
If you use them together then you can have a good monitoring solution that can catch errors before they become big problems.
How to use Performance Monitor to monitoring Storage Replica
Microsoft has publish specific performance counters to measure performance for the Storage Replication in Microsoft Docs. You can find in https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/storage-replica/server-to-server-storage-replication but i would like to included in my blog too.
- \Storage Replica Partition I/O Statistics(*)\Number of times flush paused
- \Storage Replica Partition I/O Statistics(*)\Number of pending flush I/O
- \Storage Replica Partition I/O Statistics(*)\Number of requests for last log write
- \Storage Replica Partition I/O Statistics(*)\Avg. Flush Queue Length
- \Storage Replica Partition I/O Statistics(*)\Current Flush Queue Length
- \Storage Replica Partition I/O Statistics(*)\Number of Application Write Requests
- \Storage Replica Partition I/O Statistics(*)\Avg. Number of requests per log write
- \Storage Replica Partition I/O Statistics(*)\Avg. App Write Latency
- \Storage Replica Partition I/O Statistics(*)\Avg. App Read Latency
- \Storage Replica Statistics(*)\Target RPO
- \Storage Replica Statistics(*)\Current RPO
- \Storage Replica Statistics(*)\Avg. Log Queue Length
- \Storage Replica Statistics(*)\Current Log Queue Length
- \Storage Replica Statistics(*)\Total Bytes Received
- \Storage Replica Statistics(*)\Total Bytes Sent
- \Storage Replica Statistics(*)\Avg. Network Send Latency
- \Storage Replica Statistics(*)\Replication State
- \Storage Replica Statistics(*)\Avg. Message Round Trip Latency
- \Storage Replica Statistics(*)\Last Recovery Elapsed Time
- \Storage Replica Statistics(*)\Number of Flushed Recovery Transactions
- \Storage Replica Statistics(*)\Number of Recovery Transactions
- \Storage Replica Statistics(*)\Number of Flushed Replication Transactions
- \Storage Replica Statistics(*)\Number of Replication Transactions
- \Storage Replica Statistics(*)\Max Log Sequence Number
- \Storage Replica Statistics(*)\Number of Messages Received
- \Storage Replica Statistics(*)\Number of Messages Sent
Because are too much i have create an xml template that you can import in your Performance Monitor without need to start add one by one all these Performance counters.
Download the xml template here
How to import xml in Performance Monitor.
- Open Performance Monitor
- Expand Data Collector Sets
- Right click in User Defined Sets
- Click in New - - Data Collector Sets
- Write a name that you prefer. Leave the option Create from a Template. Click Next
- Click Browse and find the xml file that you download from here. Click Next.
- You can see the Storage_Replica template
- Click Next.
- Don't change and click Next.
- Click Finish
- Now you can see the new Data Collector.
- Right click and select Run.
That's it. Now you have start to monitoring performance of the Storage Replica.
Let's go to the next step
How to use Event Logs to monitoring Storage Replica.
Performance Monitor can monitoring performance of the Storage Replica. But for Warnings and errors must monitoring Event Logs.
You can use the traditional way
- Open Event Logs
- Expand Application and Services Logs - - Microsoft - - Windows
- Find and expand the Storage Replica.
- Check Admin and Operational Logs to prevent big issues.
or you can use the following Powershell command to check periodically Logs which has to do with the Replica Storage.
The -max parameter depends from you how many logs you want to see.
Get-WinEvent -ProviderName Microsoft-Windows-StorageReplica -max 5
Find an example of a health Storage Replica
Find an example of an unhealthy Storage Replica
Imagine that you didn't monitor the Logs and some day your Production Server fails and must Switch Over in the Destination Server.
But the Replication it's not working for a months.
Results
If you have already setup a Storage Replica don't leave the configuration for tomorrow or for the next week.
Start now because you never when you will have problem.
The most important you will spend 2 hours once and after that you will know what happened any time in your Replication
The results will be to that keep you safe and avoid big problems that you don't want to.
Until next article Have a nice weekend !!!
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