Disaster Recovery with VM's

[kahner]

I've seen that many people are using VM's to use as backups for physical servers and am thinking of doing the same. However, once i've virtualized all my servers does it make sense to keep the original servers at all? Should I just move to a completely VM server environment?

[idle-jam]

It's better to keep them as virtual as you will not need to deal with bare metal restoration which could be very nasty and time consuming. Another way around would be is to turn the physical host into a virtual host and that it can house the standby VM.

you can use tools like Quest's or Veeam's replication tools to automated the virtual to virtual protection.

iDLE-jAM | VCP 2, VCP 3 & VCP 4

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[AndreTheGiant]

Welcome to the community.

It depends by your type of applications... if they are not certificable on virtual environment (this does not mean that they do not work) or there is a re-lincesing problem, than you may prefer keep the physical environment and the VM only as a DR.

But if you do not have those limit, or particular performance limit, than the full virtual solution is better.

Andre

[amvmware · Accepted solution]

The only reason to keep the physical servers would be to perform a v2P if you had a problem with an application or piece of software and the vendor required you to demonstrate that the same issue would occur on a physical server as opposed to a virtual machine.

If you have verified that all your software is supported virtualised and\or you accept the support policies of the vendors such as MS and understand the implications of my first point then there is very little point in keeping the servers.

The other thing to consider is a virtual machine can still be made redundant using software from VMware, Quest, Veaam, doubletake ..etc - so if you still need DR a vm is a easier server to address and provide for than a physical server.

[Kahonu]

Aloha,

Keep in mind software CPU licensing. We are considering doing a V to P as a cost cutting measure. We have an Oracle app currently as a VM that charges per CPU ON THE HOST. It's robbery.

Bill

[petedr]

Back when Vmware first came out with GSX and then ESX we did exactly that for our DR test, that is bring back physical machines as Virtual Machines. However we then moved to all Virtual Machines which was much better all the way around.

www.phdvirtual.com, makers of PHD Virtual Backup for Vmware and Xen Server, formally esXpress

[jac777]

Go for the Continuous update as Disaster Recovery.

You can keep the physical servers running. Use vReplicator (Quest's software) with DR facility, to take the image of physical server in VMware environment and schedule it with continuous update.

This will keep the image of your physical server and continuously update it. Then you can replicate this VM to another site as disaster recovery (in case of loss of whole datacenter). You may use vReplicator for this purpose.