Using BESR and VMWare Server for Disaster Recovery

[mike0680]

I've recently tested BESR 8.5.5 for SBS on my network as a trial product and am very happy with it and will be ordering a licensed copy from my Symantec distributor next week.

One area I do want to research farther, as much for my clients as myself, is taking a image of a server and keeping it on a VM for disaster recovery. All the servers I maintain have manufacturers' warranty and should in theory be up and running within 4 to 6 hours - in practice I have had 2 IBM servers which were out of action for nearly two full days - both machines were on 24 x 7 x 4 contracts.

So although BESR would save the network once the server is fixed, I am looking for a solution during the time the server is out of action suitable for small businesses of 5 to 25 users.

Can I simply keep a regularly updated image of the server on a virtual server like VMWare Server 2.0 or ESXi 4.0 with vConverter ready to be used if the server fails or needs offline maintenance? I'm told by VM people that I would hit hardware issues as the servers would be different, but if BESR allows the server image to be loaded to different hardware in theory I feel this would work.

I probably have a far too simplistic overview on both BESR and VM as I'm new to both, so would appreciate some advice.

Many thanks,

Mike  


 

[AJT]

You can take your image and convert to a virtual machine, keep your virtual machine separate from your production network!  Also each time you run the conversion  to virtual and start up the virtual machine, the OS will probably re-activate your SBS license. Performing a convert to virtual from BESR will handle the hardware changes for you.

PS: With BESR 8.5 and higher you can take your virtual machines and restore back to physical dissimilar hardware.

You can also convert to virtual and then install BESR on it to take backups, but doing so will require a BESR license and your production data will not be in synch  with your virtual machine.

Remember, you can always convert to virtual at any time using a good latest backups of your SBS server. I recommend testing your SBS convert to virtual at least once.

 Hope this helps :)

[mike0680]

Thanks AJT - I did have a short test running a virtal server using VM Workstation 6.5 on a Vista machine, not great combination and, as you mentioned, I did hit the license re-activation, but should the virtual  server ever need to be used it would typically be only for a couple of days. 

Converting to virtual and installing BESR would require a server licence as well as an additional BESR one, so I need to look at the most cost effective solution. Would it be better to only do a convert when a major software change is made and just use a standard backup routine to synchronise the data?

Thank you for confirming the convert will handle the hardware changes to the VM host.