Configuring Shared Drives and Replication

[gundumon]

In our production environment, we have a Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise virtual server with two logical drives (C and D). The D drive contains a folder that contains files we receive daily from upstream. These files gets loaded to our system via Autosys jobs.

We also have a DR environment. Currently, the files we receive on production are not replicated across to DR. So, if anything goes wrong with the production server and we switch to DR, we have to request the files again from upstream and load them.

Question(s):

1. Can we configure a logical drive where-in data gets replicated across to DR server ?
2. Can we replicate a specific folder within the logical drive (for example, a specific folder within D drive) ?
3. Can we create a logical drive which can be shared across production environment servers and still replicate the contents to DR (high availability) ?

I am not too familiar with (logical) drive configurations, hence asking the above questions. Hope someone can advise on the feasibility and point me to a few links on how to make this happen.

Thank you,

[daphnissov]

While this really isn't a VMware-related issue, I can give you some suggestions that are most commonly seen.

1.) Microsoft DFS. Commonly used in scenarios like this. I'm not a DFS expert so you'll have to take this one to a MS-oriented forum.

2.) VM replication of specific drive. You say C and D are "logical" drives, but if these map to separate VMDK disks, then there are many replication applications which can selectively replicate at the per-disk level to a destination. Exclusion of folders within disks isn't usually a feature, and depending on the amount of data, available bandwidth, and other considerations you might be making things too complicated anyhow.

3.) rsync-type file-based replication. This is more complex but nonetheless an option.