Mirroring 2 PowerEdge R710 Rack Servers

Nadzz

Hi All,

I am new to VM so please have patience with me, my question is that we have 2 identical Dell PowerEdge R710 servers at work, first 1 is running VMware vsphere 5 that boots from in built flash SD card, we setup first new baremetal servers and then setup our Netapp data storage with it, and install our print, DHCP and different application servers on it.

Its all working fine,now we bought another same exact spec server and install VMware vsphere 5 on it, it does have around 5.41Tb of RAID 6 storage, and now we want to set it up so it will be the exact replica of the first VMware server, Idea is to get rid of our 3 or 4 current servers and put new VM's on our new Dell servers in which we can hold multiple VMs and place 1 at each site. Then setup the VMs to be replicated between each site for disaster recovery purposes.

Is it possible?

Will VMware site recovery manager 5, Veeman or Vreplicator will do the job?

Do i need to setup cloning or take snapshots and then move them to the 2nd server?

Apologize there is not much info here, but i can provide more details if you guys need.

Please check the attachment

Thanks in advance. :biggrin:
Attached Files

dales

You can do this pretty easily with veeam, you could use SRM but TBH its not as feature rich as veeam B&R 6 is. You can do replication compression with veeam and near CDP with the software all you need is two windows licences one for the veeam install at the main site and another at the dr site as a proxy so that the veeam vm and the proxy vm can compress and replicate data. If you have a look at the veeam website there are loads of handy resources on how it works and also youtube is also a good place for real world user generated demonstrations.

Veeam Also has an extensive backup capabilities and it tests the backup works and you can power on the backup direct from your backup server and vmotion it back to your production luns.

dave330i

Veeam & SRM 5 will handle replication between sites. We couldn't get vReplicator to work. Your 2nd site will be a recovery site, so the VMs will be in "standby" mode. Both Veeam & SRM can handle the initial replication, but its preferred to sneaker over the initial replication due to size. Veeam 5 had RPO of 5 min. SRM has 15 min.

From your description, it doesn't look like you have local redundancy.

QHalo

For this setup, Veeam would be a better and far cheaper solution. SRM is for datacenter recoveries with lots of VM's and hosts. It's kind of tough to really compare the two products. They're apples and oranges really and in some ways complimentary.

jibbajabba

QHalo wrote: »

SRM is for datacenter recoveries with lots of VM's and hosts.

While SRM supports 1000 protected machines, it only supports 500 replicated ones. I agree, it's a lot, but some environments have a lot more than that and at $500 PER VM by far not the cheapest product.

Nadzz

dales wrote: »

You can do this pretty easily with veeam, you could use SRM but TBH its not as feature rich as veeam B&R 6 is. You can do replication compression with veeam and near CDP with the software all you need is two windows licences one for the veeam install at the main site and another at the dr site as a proxy so that the veeam vm and the proxy vm can compress and replicate data. If you have a look at the veeam website there are loads of handy resources on how it works and also youtube is also a good place for real world user generated demonstrations.

Veeam Also has an extensive backup capabilities and it tests the backup works and you can power on the backup direct from your backup server and vmotion it back to your production luns.

Thanks Dale, i am also thinking to go with Veeam.

Nadzz

jibbajabba wrote: »

While SRM supports 1000 protected machines, it only supports 500 replicated ones. I agree, it's a lot, but some environments have a lot more than that and at $500 PER VM by far not the cheapest product.

hi jibbajabba, you are right SRM is not the cheapest option, Veeam will do the work for us, we are going to have 9 or 10 VM's on 1 server and replicate the whole server to 2nd one in case first one goes down. Thanks all for the priceless info cheers

Nadzz

dave330i wrote: »

Veeam & SRM 5 will handle replication between sites. We couldn't get vReplicator to work. Your 2nd site will be a recovery site, so the VMs will be in "standby" mode. Both Veeam & SRM can handle the initial replication, but its preferred to sneaker over the initial replication due to size. Veeam 5 had RPO of 5 min. SRM has 15 min.

From your description, it doesn't look like you have local redundancy.

Hi Dave, Nope we don't have redundancy, we have setup our first VMware baremetal server and have 5 VM's on it and we its not live right now, we are not going to have external recovery site, same site 2 identical servers, replica of each other, one goes down get the other one up.

Is this is a an ok solution? or we need to look more in deeper? thanks

jibbajabba

Nadzz wrote: »

Veeam will do the work for us, we are going to have 9 or 10 VM's on 1 server and replicate the whole server to 2nd one in case first one goes down.

That's what I implemented for a customer once. He had no money for a San / clustered solution so he had one beefy host with local storage (running 8x 147GB SAS using 15k drives) and then one not so beefy with cheap TB Sata spindles running in a second datacenter and Veeam was used - running as VM - to replicate the VMs once a day to the DR site.

I even went a bit further. On the DR site we had another Veeam instance which had normal VSS backup jobs which run a continues job of his DB server.

We could have handled that by one Veeam instance obviously but he wanted to use two so the second one is ready to take over replications to a third site etc.

He also used the email notification as cheap way to make sure his DR is up and running as he'd see if backups of SQL server stop.

That way he had not just a whole infrastructure in case the DC slides in the ocean but also nearly real time backups of his DB server.

The offsite ESXI host had 8x 2TB in Raid 6 so far from speedy, but he'd be up in no time and had massive amounts of storage / backups.

Big difference between SRM and that is obviously automation. SRM will handle the failover automatically whilst Veeam still need someone to power the VMs on and the production site off if needed.

dave330i

Nadzz wrote: »

Hi Dave, Nope we don't have redundancy, we have setup our first VMware baremetal server and have 5 VM's on it and we its not live right now, we are not going to have external recovery site, same site 2 identical servers, replica of each other, one goes down get the other one up.

Is this is a an ok solution? or we need to look more in deeper? thanks

I'm guessing you don't have a SAN/NAS. If you have 1, then clustering the 2 servers is a much better solution (assuming you have a vCenter Server License). If you don't have one, then replicating to 2nd server will work. It'll probably be better if you have bi-directional replication so both servers work.

If your RPO can afford a day loss, you can cluster the 2 servers, create software SAN/NAS using Openfiler/freeNAS on both servers, use vDR to backup VMs on server 1 to SAN on server 2 and vice versa. This solution would only need vSphere license.

Nadzz

dave330i wrote: »

I'm guessing you don't have a SAN/NAS. If you have 1, then clustering the 2 servers is a much better solution (assuming you have a vCenter Server License). If you don't have one, then replicating to 2nd server will work. It'll probably be better if you have bi-directional replication so both servers work.

If your RPO can afford a day loss, you can cluster the 2 servers, create software SAN/NAS using Openfiler/freeNAS on both servers, use vDR to backup VMs on server 1 to SAN on server 2 and vice versa. This solution would only need vSphere license.

Hi Dave,
Thanks, we have setup our first Netapp NAS box recently, we only have license for VMware Vsphere 5, i can check if we can buy one for VMware V Centre Server, does it cost around 7 grand for 5 instances

VMware vCenter Server Standard for vSphere 5(Per Instance) + Basic (12x5) 1 Year Support
Technical Support, 12 Hours/Day, per published Business Hours, Mon. thru Fri. $6,044.00

How can we setup bi-directional replication?

vDR is excellent product, will do all the work

dave330i

Getting vCenter is the better option since you have a NAS. Assuming you have a standard ESXi license you'll have HA & vMotion once you cluster the servers. HA will automatically restart VMs running on failed host to other hosts. vMotion will allow you to live migrate running VMs from 1 host to another.

Cost to protect 4-5 VMs using Veeam should be similar to vCenter license.

Nadzz

dave330i wrote: »

Getting vCenter is the better option since you have a NAS. Assuming you have a standard ESXi license you'll have HA & vMotion once you cluster the servers. HA will automatically restart VMs running on failed host to other hosts. vMotion will allow you to live migrate running VMs from 1 host to another.

Cost to protect 4-5 VMs using Veeam should be similar to vCenter license.

Yep we are now trying to get some quotes from Dell and other resellers, see how we go?