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Mark_Bayliss
Contributor
Contributor

Advice - Cheap DR solution

Hi all,


We have 24 VMs running in our production environment running on vSphere, SAN etc etc. I have been asked to rebuild our DR environment. We currently have VMware server in place on a standalone box that has the ability to power on some VM from the production in the event something does go wrong.

I am curious to know what others might be doing to build cheap DR solutions. We are a school with little budget. Any pointers or advice would be great.

Thanks in advance.

Cheers,

Mark

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idle-jam
Immortal
Immortal

you could buy a similar hardware for the host or newer hardware better performance as primary and current as DR. then install HP Lefthand VSA to perform storage replication between both sites. another option is to use VM to VM replication from Quest vRanger or Veeam Backup.

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bulletprooffool
Champion
Champion

Mark - do you have any type of storage replication?

If you do - you could simply replicate your datastore and create a second ESXi, with this storage attached and script the failover.

If not - look into the various backup products on the market - Veaam has a pretty nice solution that allows quick restores - but at a price of course.

In case of disaster, what are your Recovery Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives?

The longer these are - the cheaper providing a DR solution would be.

What SAN are you using?

One day I will virtualise myself . . .
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Mark_Bayliss
Contributor
Contributor

We do have vRanger which does include Replication. We currently have an EMC CX310. Our total combined VMs is at 2TB using 48GB RAM which replication to another system in a nearby building via network would be good .

I was thinking of replicating using vRanger from our production (vSphere) to an ESXi host attached with some storage using openfiler or something like that. Getting some core system services back online such as DC's and admin systems (SQL) etc within few hours would be ideal.

Thanks again.

Mark

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idle-jam
Immortal
Immortal

great idea, if it's an single ESXi host you can just replicate it to local datastore and can do without openfiler.

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bulletprooffool
Champion
Champion

vRanger and some cheap storage will do the job.

Have a look at the QNAP and Netgear NAS units that are available - they are prettuy cheap - can easily scale to 2 TB and are VMware certified.

They are also able to repsent as iSCSI or NFS - so for 'worst case scenarios' will be ideal.

Good luck - once ou have created your 'DR on a shoestring' solution - please feed back and share with the community.

One day I will virtualise myself . . .
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bulletprooffool
Champion
Champion

btw Mark - is your source ESX an ESXi host or VMware server?

One day I will virtualise myself . . .
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Mark_Bayliss
Contributor
Contributor

Hi,

Thanks for the response. My source is ESX 4.0. Three physical servers.

Cheers,

Mark

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bulletprooffool
Champion
Champion

Ok Mark will move the thread to the correct board - you should receive more responses.

Discussion moved to applicable board

One day I will virtualise myself . . .
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