Cold Backups for Disaster Recovery
Be prepared with complimentary “cold” backup server licenses for
disaster recovery. To qualify for this Software Assurance benefit,
you must have a Microsoft server license and all corresponding Client Access Licenses (CALs)—if required by the software—enrolled
in active Software Assurance.
Additional Permitted Use of Windows Server
• Other than backup instances run on Microsoft Azure Services, Windows Server License is not required for the disaster recovery Server if the following conditions are met:
• The Hyper-V role within Windows Server is used to replicate Virtual OSEs from the production Server at a primary site to a disaster recovery Server.
• The disaster recovery Server may be used only to
- run hardware virtualization software, such as Hyper-V,
- provide hardware virtualization services,
- run software agents to manage the hardware virtualization software,
- serve as a destination for replication,
- receive replicated Virtual OSEs, test failover,
- await failover of the Virtual OSEs, and
- run disaster recovery workloads as described above.
• The disaster recovery Server may not be used as a production Server.
"Ideally what i would have is a server with hyper-v replicas syncing to it that i can turn on if anything happens to my cluster and all i need to do is change DFS and DNS to redirect users to these."
This raises questions with me. Am I correct thinking you have a 3-node cluster already, hosting one or more VMs? And this additional host would be a cold standby for that cluster?