Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of filtrationproducts
filtrationproductsFlag for United States of America

asked on

Offsite Replication Solution

I currently have two VMWare servers that host 5 virtual machines running Windows Server 2012. One server is the main, and the other has replicas. I would like to have an additional offsite replicated server for 3 of the 5 servers. I am implementing new servers so I am open to using alternate software on the host. But this decision will be based on the ability to achieve reliable offsite replication. Is this something a new version of VMWare can handle? Or is there a better software solution, such as Hyper-V that would be a better option.

Thanks in advance!
Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Flag of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland image

Depending upon your Shared Storage Solution, or Backup Solution, many now offer offsite to Amazon AWS Storage, which is very cost effective.

Shortly VMware will also be offering Amazon AWS additional services.

Would you like to store copies of backups, or BRING ONLINE Virtual Machines, should you have a failure ?
Do you want host-based or guest-based replication?  I have had great success with Double-Take Availability, which is very inexpensive for a virtual machine.  It runs inside the guest OS, and you can opt to replicate the entire VM, or you can opt to replicate just the data within the VM, leaving the OS and other services separate.  (This buys you protection from a bad OS patch or malware that takes out the OS.)  By only replicating the changed data (and optionally enabling high compression rates and bandwidth throttling), this works very well for large data sets and WAN links.

For servers where immediate access to the backup server is not required (i.e. you have time to do a restore process), the Double-Take DR solution works similarly.  It replicates changing data just like Double-Take Availability, but it sends it to a repository server for storage.  In the event the production box fails, you set up a Restore job from the repository to a newly-created VM, and when it is done restoring, you boot it up, with all of your data intact up to the point of the failure.  Price-wise, Double-Take DR is about 1/4th the cost, so this makes a lot of sense if you already have local replication as protection for system failure, and if you only need some extra (off-site) peace of mind.
Avatar of filtrationproducts

ASKER

Andrew,

I would like to bring them online in the event of a failure.

Bill,

I want to keep the current configuration (having onsite backup and replication) for local fail-over. And I believe I would prefer to host the solution myself, but I am open to looking into hosted options. But I am not very familiar with the hosted solution and how it functions (we host SQL, and IIS on site ourselves that is accessed from the internet as well as local workstations)

And activating the replicas would need to be instantaneous (or as close to that as possible).

Dan
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Flag of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
SOLUTION
Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Based on your description I believe I would prefer a host based solution. I am going to do some testing with HotLink and Double Take and see if they work for me. I will accept both your answers as solutions and post back after I find a solution that works.
I will be looking into these solutions and will post back later.