stiscooby

I am currently looking into providing a customer with a new server or two (physical machines) and then installing a few virtual servers onto these, not difficult, but................. the customer also has a requirement for disaster recovery so is planning on having another physical server off site, which in the event of a disaster he can then go to the other site and access his latest copy/backup of his virtual server(s) and away he goes.

Now the main issue I’m trying to find a solution for is how to get a copy of the virtual servers to the other site, bearing in mind the virtual server files will be a good few hundred Gb because the flat files are the size of the virtual disks.

One thought was at the main office the virtual server files could be sitting on a NAS drive or something similar which can be picked up and moved to the other site but then if his office burns to the floor the NAS drives won’t be much good!

I can't really see a way of being able to backup/copy the files from one site to another as the files will be far too big, unless I can find a piece of software that does it at byte level? I currently run a remote backup solution called Attix5 which can backup exchange database files at byte level so only updates the "updated" parts of the file rather than uploading the large files each night but this backs up to a hosted system, not possible to point the data somewhere else.

Do any of you IT bods do anything similar and could off any advice/solution?

Cheers

markr1963

Take a look at DoubleTake. Hope you have deep pockets though

David_Wallis

VMWare do site recovery manager..

or your other options are backup using something like esx ranger then ship the tgz files.

Or use proper storage rather than NAS and do san replication.

you using esx? or esxi or worse??

ESX4 is due out soon

stiscooby

That looks like just the ticket!......... any idea on costs as I can't seem to find anything on the web site?

The customer also wants 18 hours of UPS backup (they recently had a whole day without power in their office, in the middle of pay day, so they ended up taking a server to the MD's house where he has his own office/network and worked from there. Hence the reason for wanting full disaster recovery etc) and wasn't shocked when we told him it will cost 16K so this software 'might' not be out of the question?

Thanks for the info

stiscooby

Yea, we have been looking at ESX3 i think it is. So far we can see our main issue is backing up the image files because of their size and obviously needing to do this across a WAN.

hhmmm....... maybe san could be the way to go, haven't really looked at that as yet.

David_Wallis

thats nothing, I have around 200TB of data to come up with a solution for

SAN is the best way forward, especially if you look at EMC / Netapp than can integrate snapshots and replication so that you can ensure you replicate data that is in a consistent state rather than doing syncronous mirror which can introduce latency and also replicate corruption, where as async can be more appropriate depending on the app.

One thing you can do with VMware if you have SAN connectivity across sites (iSCSI would do) is do a storage VMotion, so you could live migrate a VM across to another Datacentre without dropping a ping.

That doesnt help in the event of DR though, only Maintanance really..

David

markr1963

I had a quote done a few months back. I'll dig it out but the pricing may be a bit off what with volatile exchange rates and such. It'd give you an idea though.

As others have mentioned there's many ways to skin this particular cat depending on the depth of one's pockets.
From a purely backing up VMs perspective I've had good results with Vizioncore's vRanger 3 (v4 coming soon). I think it got a mention earlier with shipping tgz files.

markr1963

David

What are classing as 'worse'? HyperV, Zen..? Just curious.

ESX4: have you seen it yet? The local VMware guys had internal training a couple of weeks back so I guess it's close to RTM.