Recommendation for on-site disaster recovery for a single VMware vSphere 4 ESX server?

[rainman81]

I am exploring setting up a new Dell server running VWware vSphere 4 ESX and am wondering what is a good solution to enable an on-site disaster recovery solution in the event of a complete server failure? I am guessing at the minimum I'd need a similar server on-site but not sure if vCenter or what solution would allow the ability to quickly recover any virtual machines I had running on this single server?

Thank you,

[athlon_crazy]

vCenter with HA license + Shared storage should be enough. Inevitably when one ESX host went down, another ESX will startup your VMs within a minutes. But of course, you need to have your VMs in shared storage first.

vcbMC-1.0.6 Beta

vcbMC-1.0.7 Lite

http://www.no-x.org

[AntonVZhbankov]

You can do it via

1) VMware HA - very quick, all changes are recent, but it protects you from host death only and you have single point of failure - storage

2) Veeam Backup & Replication - with replication feature you can replicate VMs to another host with different storage, but you won't have most recent changes.

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MCSA, MCTS Hyper-V, VCP 3/4, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[rainman81]

Excellent thank you. To save some money in purchasing a disaster recovery server, can Vmware vSphere 4 ESXi free be installed and used to recover VMs from an ESX server?

[AntonVZhbankov · Accepted solution]

Only for single shared storage case. Veeam does not support Free ESXi, but you can actually buy vSphere Essentials (3 hosts plus vCenter) for 500$ total.

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MCSA, MCTS Hyper-V, VCP 3/4, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[rainman81]

Many thanks.