Need advice DR/BCP Site ideas

[cgarciamoran]

Hey all;

I've been tasked with coming up with a solution for a BCP/DR site for our in-house datacenter, of the 80 Servers we have the Biz has decided we only need 30 up and running within 3 days the rest can take their time. Here's my thoughts for what I wanted to do with the limited budget and was wondering if anyone has done something similar

30 Servers all W2K3 Ent on HP hardware

AD Site

2 Exchange server 1 is archive

I have a small iSCSI SAN I would use in the BCP site

Fat Pipe between us and the DR/BCP site

I'm thinking of getting the new blade enclosure with 6 X 465 blades with VI3 running on all of them. Buy the IT version on Storagecraft IT protect and take nightly dumps of the 30 servers and copy them down the pipe to the DR site. I can then use the SP images and convert them to VM guests. Test them every month .

How's that sounds at the top level? has anyone done something akin to this and has other ideas on what to use. I like the price of Storagecraft that's why I was looking into them plus you can use VMware converter on their images

thx!

[Texiwill]

Hello,

It is best to do any BC/DR prevention at the Storage level, and that sounds like what you are doing. Otherwise you could tie this into your site backup policy.

Are the 30 Servers physical or Virtual? If physical then a P2V process using VMware Converter will be necessary as well. This does not always go 100% smoothly so your 3 days could get into a week or more.... If you are going virtual to virtual then everything is fine.

You did not state if you were starting with virtual machines or not. If not the P2V process will be painful in a rush situation. I would imagine it will not happen within 3 days. You would need to P2V around the clock to get your 30 machines and problems will occur....

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky, author of the forthcoming 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', publishing January 2008, (c) 2008 Pearson Education. Available on Rough Cuts at http://safari.informit.com/9780132302074

[cgarciamoran]

The 30 servers are physical, So I was going to use shadow protect to create backups of them, copy the backups over the pipe and then use the backups with converter or shadow protect to turn them into VM's at the DR Site. Since we have a limited budget this is what I can come up with. For 2009 Im hoping to get an NS20/40 from EMC at the BCP site and them I can do some block level replication

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Well getting the data over to the other side sounds good, but converting the OS to a VM is not a simple 15 minute task. you have 3 days to do this, have you done any Physical to Virtual conversions yet? I suggest before you go done this road, do some and see how long it takes. The pure conversion may be short, a few hours per system, but the fixing of the VM so that it actually performs and runs properly could be an issue.... If you have hardware agents, they need to be removed for example. I recently did a P2V of a WinXP box that was a patch below what was supported on ESX, it took 2 days to find the answer to the problem, apply the windows patch, and redo the P2V. THe previous example shows that you need to determine if everything will work before even going forward. I would get a demo license of ESX, and do the P2Vs of the 30 critical servers, see how long it takes to do this. 3 days may not be enough time. However, it also could be enough time if everything goes 100% correctly.... In a stressful situation, how often does this happen? To help document the process per Machine as to the exact steps to get the system running within VMware ESX.

If your test prove to you it will work, and you have good documentation that anyone can follow, then your solution could work just fine. In addition, there are some Physical VMs that just do not make good candidates and should never be virtualized for performance reasons at the very least. So in addition, to running your test and documenting the steps, grab some utilization data off the physical boxes and determine if they will even work on ESX.... VMware has such a tool, Platespin PowerRecon could also work.

There are quite a few variables here that could serious hamper your plan.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky, author of the forthcoming 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', publishing January 2008, (c) 2008 Pearson Education. Available on Rough Cuts at http://safari.informit.com/9780132302074

[cgarciamoran]

thx! definetly some stuff to think offf

We down have some VI3 Servers up and running already for things like AD, SMTP and Monitoring, We havent Virtualized our heavy hitters yet because we dont have decent hardware and the biz folks need some hard proof of concept. We done some tests where weve used acronis TI to take a snap of a live hardware server and turned into a VM guest all said and done it took about 6-8 hours to get it right. I looked into Storagecraft server protect since they have a relationship with VMware and their product states they can do P2V, bare metal restores and more. So I was looking to see if anyone has done something similar

thx!