DR solution ideas?

[baronne]

Hi folks,

Quite a newbie on this subject, so I'm after some advice here. We've bought a beefy new server we'd like to use as an offsite DR server hosting "cold" clones of our servers at our main site. My plan is to clone the machines with Acronis and import them into VMware server (I'm using VMware Server 2 beta). The problem I'm a bit stumped with is how am I going to continually keep up-to-date snapshots of the virtual images? We only have a slow link to our branch office site and so updates could "trickle" over night, but I am not sure how we could go about accomplishing this?


Does anyone have any suggestions?


Regards,


Baronne Mouton


:: baronne
------------------
"lekker, shot bru

 

[Arisap]

Really your best bet for this solution is to use PlateSpin PowerConvert. The product will allow you to take live images of runing windows systems and create VM's on another system. It can then do file or block level differential image transfers. This way the only heavy lifting is the first image and the differentials thereafter will be very small. It will also change IP addresses on the destination if necessary.

Using Acronis, you should be able to accomplish a similar effect with a bit more work. Acronis also supports live imaging and differential backups.

 

[ArizonaGeek]

I would suggest Double Take as a DR solution across a WAN. What you would do is before you deploy your DR hardware to the DR site you would sync then two machines across your LAN then move it off site, from there you would only sync changes across your WAN. Double Take has worked pretty good for us. I've got no complaints.

Cheers
Rob

The answer is always "PEBKAC!