Replication question

[rsoulliard]

I'm not sure if this is the correct place to ask this question. We have a large file server VM that we need to replicate to our DR site (from Boston to Washington DC) we currently have a T1 connection between them. We probably see about 8GB of changes to the server a day. There is a C drive with mostly just the OS, a 135GB data drive and a 500GB data drive. Does anyone have a recomendation on the best way to handle the replication? We tried using vReplicator from Vizioncore, it works fine with our other servers, but it takes weeks to replicate just the 135GB vmdk. I need to come up with a better solution.

Thanks

Ron Soulliard

Oxfamamerica

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Is this ESX/ESXi or one of Fusion, Workstation, or Server.

You want a tool that replicates the initial disk and then just the changes going forward. Some of the backup tools only backup the changes since the last backup. Perhaps this is a better approach. You backup across the wire the disk changes to the remote site, then redeploy the VM at the remote site. Or just backup and redeploy when its required.... Veeam, Vizioncore, and PhD Virtual all have products that do this.

Veeam also has built in replication. I would look at Veeam as an alternative to vReplicator.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky VMware Communities User Moderator, VMware vExpert 2009, Virtualization Practice Analyst[/url]
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[Gostev]

Edward, thanks for mentioning our solution. :smileyblush:

Ron, we are getting ready to release Veeam Backup and Replication version 4 in the coming weeks, it has some exciting new features as it comes to replication

• Replica seeding (initial sync over removable storage)

• Near-CDP protection by leveraging new ESX4 capabilities

• Support for slow and high-latency links

• Safe snapshot removal to prevent timeouts on source VM during removal of large snapshots

• Disk exclusions (so you can move your swap file to a separate virtual disk and do not replicate it)

Of course, there are tons more features around backup and management - replication is just one part of our product.

More info on this new release (incl. video) can be found here:

But even with the current version, our replication is unique in the number of ways, and has features you will not find in competitive solutions:

• Replica rollback (ability to failover to an early point in time in case you noticed software corruption too late and it got replicated to replica)

• Network traffic compression

• No requirement to keep open snapshot on source VMs

• LAN free replication that does not touch your production hosts (data retrieved directly from the shared storage, instead of leveraging ESX host agent)

• VSS support for ALL VSS-aware Windows OS (not just 2003/2008), with custom restore for Domain Controllers and Exchange servers (fully implementing Microsoft restore guideliness).

• File level restores from replica

• and many other features

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to PM me, or better yet, ask it on Veeam Community Forums at