DR Site Setup?

[hutchingsp]

We're looking at using ESX for various non-critical services but are exploring the options it would give us with our critical services such as our MIS systems.

Physically we're a large site so our "off site" location would be a couple of miles away on the end of a 2gbps fibre link.

I presume we would need one or more ESX boxes in both locations. What I'm not sure on is what we would need to have the VM's replicated between both locations?

I'm not looking specifically at 100% automated, seemless failover, more at what the options are if one location went up in smoke to quickly get our VM based services up and running on the hardware/storage in the other location?

[MR-T]

You've got a number of choices and I'm sure a quick search through this forum will give you plenty to think about.

If your using a SAN at each end there's usually some replication solution available with that.

Double-Take is worth looking at.

Vizioncore have ESXReplicator which is very easy to setup and operate, plus you licence this on a per-vm basis, so can be very cost effective. Finally it allows yo uto move from SAN storage to local storage on the DR site.

[petedr]

There are a couple of products out there written specifically for replication but another solution may be the esXpress backup product. I believe it has a simple replication built into the backup product, which could handle your scenario.

[hutchingsp]

Coming back to this, one thought it a single box in each location connected to "dumb" local SAS storage.

Does using VMware server for Windows offer any benefits over ESX when it comes to simply replicating VM's to another location?

If we go down this route we would be satisfied with having to manually bring up the DR server and attach/start the VM's etc.

Actually could we use ESX on the primary server and VMware Server on the DR box so it didn't need to be a 100% dedicated box..?

Message was edited by:

hutchingsp

[MR-T]

You won't be able to simply power up machines on the VMware Server build as the disk formats are different.

I wouldn't select this option.

At the very least look at using ESX starter which is cheap, but keeps you in the bare metal family.

The dumb local storage idea is great if you're using ESXReplicator.

[hutchingsp]

ESXReplicator looks like it would work out expensive for a high number of VM's as it's licensed per VM.

I'm looking at their ESXEssentials package which includes ESXRanger which is licensed per CPU (which I take to mean socket).

As I read it, that would allow me to have an ESX server. Each night I could do a backup of all the VM's to some shared Windows storage which would get backed up to tape.

In the event we lose the ESX server we bring ESX up on another box and use ESXRanger to restore the VM's?

Not seamless but appears a fairly cheap option if we don't need High Availability etc?

[MR-T]

Spot on.

ESXRanger allows you to backup the running virtual machines and you could certainly use these backups in a DR situation.

[hutchingsp]

Thanks very much.

At the moment I have a single test server so would need to download demo's and play etc. but have I missed anything obvious here?