Where to start with disaster recovery

[jwall04]

We are starting to make a disaster recovery plan for our data center.  We have a failry small setup using vSphere 4.1 Enterprise with 6 hosts (blades) and about 30 Windows, Linux and Netware vms running on an IBM BladeCenter S.  The BladeCenter S has shared storage built into the chassis and we also have an DS3300 iSCSI storage array.  In the event that something happens to this building we want to be able to bring our most important vms (~12 of them, the others will be restored from backup but not immediately) up at another location which is connected to this buildling via a 1GB fibre connection.  We don't necessarily expect to provide the same level of service, just that our core services are available.

I understand this is a major project that cannot be answered in a forum but I'm not sure where to start, if someone could point me in the right direction or give me some ideas I'd appreciate it.

[AntonVZhbankov · Accepted solution]

You need to take a look at Site Recovery Manager. Unfortunately SRM is not the entire solution, you need also SAN-level replication for that.

If you storage does not support it or it's too expensive - you have option to upgrade to vSphere 5 and use Host Based Replication + SRM.

[jwall04]

Thanks for the reply Anton.  I starting looking at SRM and our SAN does not support replication so I'm looking at ghettoVCB now.  For our purposes I think it will work to schedule ghettoVCB to backup the vms to the other site each night (or maybe once a week), and then we can just restore our data backups which are taken each night if a disaster strikes.

[TheITHollow]

I think that SRM is great place to start this.

If you're on SRM 4.x you'll need a SAN with replication capabilities built in, in order to sync data.

However, if you're on SRM 5, VMware provides it's own replication method that can be used to do this.

I think SRM 5 would be a great place for you to get started.  It's really not that difficult to get setup and running.

[jwall04]

Thanks, that is a good bit of info about SRM.