Virtualization Mode is a dedicated management experience built for virtualization infrastructure. Unlike the standard “administration mode” of WAC which is oriented to individual servers. vMode gives a fabric‑level view, letting you centrally manage Hyper‑V hosts, clusters, storage, VMs, and networks at scale.
The official WAC vMode overview mentions that one of its capabilities is “integrated disaster recovery with Hyper‑V Replica. You can learn more from here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/manage/windows-admin-center/virtualization-mode-overview
The underlying DR technology is native Hyper‑V Replica. According to Microsoft: Hyper‑V Replica supports three failover scenarios: test failover, planned failover, and unplanned failover.
- Test failover : You spin up a test VM on the replica host/cluster, based on the latest (or other) recovery point. This test VM is not necessarily connected to production network (by default no network). This is useful to validate that replication works and the VM is bootable.
- Planned failover : Used when you can gracefully shut down the primary VM/site. It ensures that all changes (on the primary) are replicated to the replica, then you switch over with zero data loss. Good for planned maintenance, data center migrations, etc.
- Unplanned failover : Triggered when primary VM or host fails (power outage, crash, site failure, etc.). You recover using the latest available recovery point (or earlier, if configured). Depending on when the last replication occurred, there may be some data loss.
As WAC vMode is still in “preview,” there are caveats: it deploys as an appliance (gateway + agents), and manages hosts/clusters, VMs, storage, networks at scale up to 1,000 hosts and 25,000 VMs per instance. You can take a look at “Upgrade Windows Admin Center 2306 – 2311: Install WACmg 2410”, and Setup Windows Admin Center Modern Gateway for Single Sign-On.
