Monitoring Hyper-V to Azure Site Replication with Powershell

Here is a simple script that I use to monitor the replication state of Hyper-V servers that I have replicated to Azure using Site Replication.

I have this script run every morning as a scheduled task which sends me an email with a nicely formatted table showing the replication status of all of my Hyper-V VM's to Azure

I have 4 Hyper-V nodes in a cluster - I have specified the 4 node names individually and used a ForEach loop to cycle through them all the generate the report. You can remove the loop if you're only using this for a single server/host.

(You will need to have the Hyper-V powershell module/cmdlets installed for this to work)

import-module Hyper-V -RequiredVersion 1.1

$repstate = @()

$date = get-date -f "dd-MM-yyyy"

$clusternodes = "node1", "node2", "node3", "node4"

foreach ($node in $clusternodes)

    {

    $repstate += get-vmreplication -computername $node | select Name, State, Health, Mode, FrequencySec, PrimaryServer, ReplicaServer, PrimaryServerName, LastReplicationTime

    }

You can then export the values from the $repstate variable to a CSV file and attach it, or as I have done, convert it to HTML and set it to the body of an email message

$mailmessage.Body = $repstate | ConvertTo-HTML -fragment

IIS - Make OWA the Default Website Page

After installing Microsoft Exchange, a "virtual directory" for Outlook Web Access (OWA) is created that is generally accessible via the URL https://mail.yourdomain.com/owa

In some scenarios it may be preferable to configure https://mail.yourdomain.com to redirect automatically to the OWA virtual directory (as users may forget to include this part if they are manually typing the URL). This means as soon as they try to access the root domain website, they are automatically presented with a login page for OWA.

It is very easy to configure, as per the steps below;

1. Open Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager (from Control Panel > Administrative Tools)
2. Expand the tree from the left hand side and highlight/select Default Web Site
   
   
3. Double click the HTTP Redirect icon from the main window
   
   
4. Select the option to Redirect requests to this destination and enter /owa into the text box below
   Select the option to Only redirect requests to content in this directory (not subdirectories). Ensure the status code is set to Found (302)
   
   
5. Click Apply in the top right corner to apply the changes
6. Try accessing the base URL again and you should be automatically redirected to the OWA login page