Vault 9 - Can I synchronise to DR?

[James_Slack]

Hi,

I have been asked to look at getting our Vault 9 server synced to our DR site.

We have a Vault 9 server and Vault SQL 2005 server. They archive 3 Exchange 2003 servers.

The hardware is pretty old and just meets the minimum spec so I don't want to do anything too fancy like constant replication. I am happy to do a monthly backup and dump that in our DR site.

My question is more like how can Vault handle this?

I just upgraded from 7.5 to v9 yesterday so I am a totaly new guy at this version. I saw in the installing and configuring that you can run multipul servers - but how would that work with the same data?

Does anyone have and advice or maybe pointers to tech docs covering this please?

Many thanks

James

[AndrewB]

hi james, there are a few options depending on your requirements. i would start with having a read of the "Failover in a building blocks configuration" and "Recovery" sections of the EV admin guide.

if you dont find what you need in there can you elaborate a bit on your requirements?

[GertjanA]

Hi James,

"The hardware is pretty old and just meets the minimum spec so I don't want to do anything too fancy like constant replication. I am happy to do a monthly backup and dump that in our DR site."

As you probably know by now, you have to replicate both EV-data (indexes/storage) and the SQL databases. DR is not really DR if you run behind in data is it? In your scenario it would be possible to loose 1 month of data.

what you could do is setup SQL-mirroring or logshipping from your live to the DR-site, and use some tool to copy the data from the indexes and the storage to the DR-site. Initially you might want to use some trick with backup live, restore to dr, then use (for instance) robocopy to copy only changed data from live to dr.

It obviously depends on the configuration of your network/storage etc what you find acceptable. Indeed check the admin guide. Feel free to ask more questions if needed

[James_Slack]

"use some tool to copy the data from the indexes and the storage to the DR-site"

No, I couldn't.

The Vault server where this data resides flatlines at 100% CPU... as in why I said ""The hardware is pretty old and just meets the minimum spec so I don't want to do anything too fancy like constant replication."

Clearly I am happy to be one month behind, which is why I said "I am happy to do a monthly backup and dump that in our DR site."

I know this is not the best, I am just trying to make the best of a bad situation here.

In the future I am looking to go to new hardware on Vault 10, but to do that we need to spend out a rediculous ammount of money on 2008 Client licences. So for now, I am just trying to cobble somethng together that is better than nothing.

I see this the same way you clearly see it, in that it's not great and we could lose a month. But unless there is a trick to stop evconvertersandbox.exe's doing this to my system,

[URL=http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/638/vaultcpu.jpg/][IMG=http://img638.imageshack.us/img638/...

Uploaded with [URL=http://imageshack.us]ImageShack.us[/URL]

I can't justify adding anything to it!

[MichelZ]

Sounds like a healthy environment...
You might want to have that checked by an EV Consultant.

Cheers
Michel

[James_Slack]

I might but there is no budget and the problem is it's a rubbish box (minimum spec with slow disks). Vault 10 will be fine but wont be till next year. I need a basic tick the box DR solution this year.

Can someone shed any light on how DR can work with Vault please?

Can you have a 2nd Vault server installed that does not do any archving, then in the event of a disaster, you can fail over using DNS to use the other box as live?

We have SITE-A live. It archives from 3 Exchange servers. I want to just dump the vault Stores on a SITE-B server that does no archiving. Then in the event of a failure at SITE-A, we can use DNS to switch to using SITE-B just while we fix SITE-A.

I know this solution is far from ideal and not at all what I would like to do - but I think something like this is what i need to get done.

Any help would be great.

Thanks - James

[AndrewB]

james, that's pretty much the nuts and bolts of what's called 'building blocks' DR. you change the ev server alias in DNS to point to the IP of the DR server and then update service locations to tell EV that the new server is taking over. you'll want to be sure to replicate or as you said "dump" the SQL databases along with the vault stores and indexes.

[James_Slack]

Thanks AndrewB.

I can probably get the Vault SQL replicated to DR properly as that is on an OK server.

How would that work in the event of a fail over though?

SITEA talks to SQLA, how does SITEB know to talk to SQLB? Is that just done at the install time of the server or are there DNS entries for that too?

So I guess my question above is, how does Vault know which SQL database it is talking to?

Cheers

[AndrewB · Accepted solution]

from an EV perspective you wouldnt have siteA and siteB, per se. you would have live EV and stand-by EV. in the case of a disaster with SQL, it's not much more than changing a registry entry on the EV server.

here's the technote

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH35744

[James_Slack]

Thanks for all your help on this Andrew and everyone.

Looks like due to the poor performance of the box we wont be doing DR this year - will do a tape restore if we lose SITE A permanatly. Hopefully with Vault 10 we will have the perfect setup.

Cheers

james