Hi, what would you do in the following scenario?
An heterogeneous set of physical servers (with Linux or Win) owned and operated by several customers at different sites.
A vSphere infrastructure at a centralized site.
I would like to have, in my infrastructure, a powered-off VM for each of the remote physical servers and to keep the VM image in synch with the remote disks.
In case a remote site blows up, the corresponding VMs are started (automatically or manually) as a quick&effective disaster recovery solution...
Forget about the IP/networking problems of this scenario, is there a way or a 3rd party software to keep a VM synch'd with a remote physical server?
Thanks!
Platespin Protect will do this. You place the platespin agent on the physical server and you can replicate the server to an image file or a VM. You then update the image file or VM on a scheduled basis. It is based on the platespin powerrecon product.
Check it out.
Don't forget to leave points for helpful/correct posts.
There is simple solution: use SAN! You create a target, physical server can boot from it, and from in ESX you plug it too, and they always will be in 1 state, cause will use 1 storage. The only problem - 1 LUN per 1 machine, and you cannot run VM and physical machine in 1 time if your LUN doesn`t use cluster FS or FS arbiter.
StarWind Software R&D
Platespin Protect will do this. You place the platespin agent on the physical server and you can replicate the server to an image file or a VM. You then update the image file or VM on a scheduled basis. It is based on the platespin powerrecon product.
Check it out.
Don't forget to leave points for helpful/correct posts.
You could use NetApp storage in your central location and then use OSSV (Open Systems SnapVault) in the branches to replicate back to central. Or you could use Platespin Protect, or Doubletake or...depends on exactly what you are working with and need to achieve. i.e. consistency? frequency? etc
Dave
EMC Replistor is another product that will do physical to virtual with asynchronous network replication via host agent. Both source and target would need to be running, and reachable. VMware Converter has a disk sync option, but that may be risky (jobs restart from scratch if connectivity is lost).
Thanks everyone for the suggestions, I'll try out Platespin protect and Vizioncore vConverter.
Tobias offered good option - you can either use SAN solution that offers data mirroring or replication.