P to V for DR

[offlinetn]

I have been set with the task to find a solution to setup Physical to Virtual Machines for Disaster Recovery. The company I work for is a hosting / colocation company. We want to be able to offer our customers a way keep their physcial servers (non-vmware) up and running but do some type of deduplication to a VM so if their server goes down they can do a fail over to the VM. I was wondering if anyone has done this? Is there a utility for doing this? A third party app would be fine.

Thanks for any help,

Chris Edwards

[Troy_Clavell]

You can use VMware Converter for your P>V's. The starter edition is free to download

[sbeaver]

One of the best P2V products I have used was Platespin PowerConvert

Steve Beaver

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Co-Author of "VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center"

(ISBN:1420070274) from Auerbach

Come check out my blog: www.theVirtualBlackHole.com

*Virtualization is a journey, not a project.*

[offlinetn]

The converter won't help, I need to keep the physical server up and running and duplicated to a VM at the same time.

I will look into Platspin.

Thanks you both for your input.

[Troy_Clavell]

PlateSpin is great. However both products are still doing a conversion to a VM. Only when the conversion process is done will you have a VM ready. At that point you will still have the physical server available. Just don't power on the VM when the conversion process completes.

Keep in mind, while platespin is great, it is also very pricey.

please consider awarding points by marking the answers as "correct" or "helpful"

[offlinetn]

Well I am looking for something that will do like a deduplication backup does where changes on the Physical server are perodically updated to the VM.

[_David]

Vmware converter can work while the server is online.

If you found this or any other answer useful please consider the use of the Helpful or correct buttons to award points

[JDLangdon]

While I haven't tried this, I believe VizionCore's vRanger can make a VM out of a running physical server and it can be scheduled as a nightly task.

________________________________

Jason D. Langdon

[gthudson]

Visioncore vConverter will do the job you require, it will replicate P2V invcremental changes from the physical server to an offline virtual. vRanger Pro will do it too, but at additional costs. For what you require vConverter will be fine.

[azn2kew]

You can schedule P2V task to convert P2V as specified and use backup solution to do an incremental backup for those physical boxes, when needed to recover, just power up the DR VMs and then restore those incremental backups. VMware Converter is free with enterprise license why pay for PowerConvert, even though its doing great job but very pricey as mentioned.

1. Create a DR VMware hosts/clusters.

2. Stand up DR SAN environment.

3. P2V all your physicals servers to DR SAN

4. Create backup plan for incremental or anything you want.

5. Replicate all that backup data via SAN replication and restore that data when recovery strike.

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant