Remote Site (Potential DR) Consideration ....

[TonyJK]

We have been using ESX Hosts for a couple of years at our head office.

We would like to implement ESX at our remote site in the near future. The link between head office and remote site is around 9Mbps.

We have sufficient ESX Host CPU license for running VMs at each site. However, if we consider using the remote site as a DR site, in addition to the proposed SAN and ESX Host CPU licenses required, what other additional resources (Like more SAN Space or SAN Copy S/W or more ESX CPU license) we have to purchase ?

Thanks

[jamieorth]

Depending on the RTO and RPO's of the business all things for DR can vary. Are you replicating data? How much may determine that the 9Mbps circuit isn't enough. What type of traffic is already on the circuit? If you are going to use it, is QoS available to prioritize the data flow? Are you going to have idenitcal storage at each site? How many VM's do you have and what is your backup strategy of the VM's? All of these plus many more are questions I would have when thinking of DR and VM.

Regards...

Jamie

Remember, if it's not one thing, it's your mother...

[TonyJK]

1) QoS can be enabled on the existing link

2) Existing traffic is mainly getting data from Internet from Remote Site to Head Quarter (Remote Site is connected to ISP provider)

3) We are currently using EMC CX3-20 at HQ and most likely, we will use it at the Remote Site as well

4) There are around 10 VMs at the HD and 5 VMs will be at the Remote Site

5) Is there other options other than replicating data between the site for DR ? If yes, can it be arranged to be done at night ? Does the replication handled by SAN provider or by VMWare product ?

Thanks

[jamieorth]

To answer #5 - yes, there are a lot of ways other than replication. I had a CX500 at one site and an older CX300 at a backup site. We had 4 hosts at the main location with 2 hosts at the backup site and no SAN replication. We used vReplicator for 4 critical VM's with our highest priority RTO and RPO. They were set to every 15 minutes, but we had to scale it back to every hour due to bandwidth constraints (10 meg MPLS and no more $$$ to bump it up ). For the remaining vm's we used vRanger to backup the files to a LUN attached to our backup server, and after that completed we backed up the entire fileset to LTO. The LTO went off to Iron Mountain but in testing we could recover VM's from the tape (we had a 2nd backup server already built) using Backup Exec and vRanger in a couple of hours. We attempted to just back them up over the wire, but again, the bandwidth just wasnt there for my time constraints.

Regards...

Jamie

Remember, if it's not one thing, it's your mother...

[Berniebgf]

I agree with Jamieorth

regarding looking into vReplicator instead of the "Storage based replication", it will provide you with more flexibility in choosing what you want to replicate and will have more "VM state" awareness.

Also, this chart could help with your WAN link speeds. (Go down the page to see chart on WAN speeds)

http://www.las-solanas.com/storage_virtualization/asynchronous_replication.php

Its a good read.

best regards

Bernie

http://sanmelody.blogspot.com