We're in the process of building out an EV DR site in an offsite datacenter. We have 5 mailbox archiving servers, 1 public folder archiving server, 1 journal archiving server, and 1 FSA archiving server.
My plan is to build out a VM-based DR solution using building blocks/USL. The only phsyical server @ the DR site will be a standby SQL server. The load that gets put on our SQL server I don't feel comfortable putting on a VM. Unless there are major issues with our production datacenter, I'd expect this to be mostly read-only.
My biggest questions are related to the disk replication. Our disk is located on a Clariion/Celerra and we'll be replicating all this data to a similar unit in our offsite location. Each of our archiving servers have 5 mount points of high speed RAID 10 disk for the index locations. SQL databases are on the high speed disk as well, and the .DVS files get dropped on a Celerra NAS (under the same Clariion head).
I know when backups run that consistency is important, thus the requirement to put EV in backup mode. What is the best practice for replicating the EV indexes and databases and keeping everything in sync on the other end? Obviously when backup mode is enabled, it won't be a problem, but if the Clariion were to catch fire during an archive run, how can I prevent my indexes, databases, and files on the NAS from being out of sync? My SAN team is proposing a rolling snapshot/replication method where a consistency group is set for each server and they replicate one after the other and then start back over at the beginning. They do not feel comfortable snapping and replicating as many LUNs as we have all at the same time for fear of what kind of load that may put on our SAN. I am worried about this causing inconsistencies in case of a failure.
Has anyone else dealt with this or have any suggestions?
Thanks!
Chadster