Hello there,
I am looking into building a Disaster Recovery plan that involves our current VMWare 3.0.2 Hosts and a remote site that will be used for our DR location.
Currently we have a single location data center, and within this center we have
2 Dell ESX hosts
SAN storage for the hosts. (very little free space left on the the SAN or local storege)
a combo of local and SAN storaged VM guests (all guests are Windows Server 2003) hosting MS products such as SQL file and Exchange services.
Currently we are backing up the Guests via BackupExec 11D via the Windows Agents.
We are looking at adding a powerful server at the second location, with a large external RAID5/RAID10 Array (any preferences to the RAID level? will be using 15K drives in this setup)to have a 3rd VMWare host server.
The second location has a T1 line or better that will be connecting the two offices.
My inital thoughts are how to get a duplicate setup on this new server of what is housed on the current system.
+I have seen some options thatnote the use of the following:
VCB to backup the guest systems
BackupExec 11D using the VCB
each of these seem to have issues of its own, from what I have seen.
Once I could get the Images over to the new server, then I would feel more confortable to have these server 'Powered Off', and update the guests on a schedule basis (the whole VM).
Then from a DR place i would be looking at the majority of the ground work completed to bring the VM servers online and restored to the latest backup.
That being said I am sure that I am missing a few things in the overall scheme of this. One question that I see is moving the VMguests to the new box, and a best method to keep these VM up to a curenlt level.
Any recommendation woud be great.
Thank you.
Adam
