what solution for disaster recovery

[pixxure]

Hi all,

I am looking for a solution that will allow us to implement a disaster recovery scenario with a secondary site.

Currently we have only a primary site where all hardware is located.  This hardware consists of a VMware esx cluster that runs windows2008 servers.

All storage is on a fujitsu dx80 that is connected with FC to the VMware cluster.

We want to setup a secondary site for failover but for sake of the budget we want to implement a proxmox or convirture cluster there to run our machines and for storage go for a Qnap IP-NAS.

the idea is to replicate the data of an exchange server, 2 SQL servers , and 2 fileservers to the secondary site.

When the primary fails, we start up the VM's on the proxmox cluster, and are ready to go.

so the solution will have to allow for vmware to proxmox/convirture failover as well as be able to handle the fact that our SAN's at the primary and secondary site's are from a different brand. replications mode can be asynchronous or synchronous. the two sites are connected over LAN

A sales rep from symantec told me that backup exec 2012 can do all this for us. But I am not so sure.

Can anybody help me with this?

kind regards,

Sander

[CraigV · Accepted solution]

Hi Sander,

The sales guy is totally wrong and has obviously either never heard of, or consulted, the BE 2012 SCL. Check the link below, as neither of those 2 virtualization platforms are supported by BE 2012 at all.

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH175581

You would need to look at another option that supports both VMware and the other 2 virtualization platforms for what youw ant to do. Otherwise if you had VMware installed on the DR site it would work.

THanks!

[pixxure]

Thank you fro your reply!

well it is possible for us to install Vmware on the DR site if needed be.

the NAS on the DR-site  would still be of a different brand than the one on the main site though for budget reasons.

so if both site's run VMware then we can replicate our data from NAS to NAS with backup exec?

and which versions of BE would we need?

kind regards,

sander

[Tim_Collins_]

If you have vmware essentials or above they have released vmware replication in vsphere 5.1 free of charrge. That can replicate between mismatched sans.

[CraigV]

You could do a duplicate of your disk backup to the remote NAS. From there you would then catalog the media and restore into VMware. You'd need a BE server on the remote site...

[pixxure]

Hello ,

I can indeed do a duplicate to the remote NAS but this is not the same as continous replication and would still leave us vulnerable to dataloss of max 24 hours?  ( i presume the duplication takes places once a day during the backup window)

unfortunatly an upgrade to vmware 5 is out of our budget.