*** update in following post ***
This is new-ish territory for me...boss wants me implement a failover-type plan for the business...with typical constraints: NO DOWNTIME & NO BUDGET!
Okay, not quite that bad, but I'm still in over my head:
Current Situation: One Dell Poweredge 2900 hosting 5 VM's, with NTI Shadow running periodic backups to an external USB drive, swapping USB drives once per week
Goal:
The (inflexible) plan is to purchase 2 NAS devices, dedicate one of the four ports on each server to a private network, such that both servers and one of the NAS devices are connected by a dedicated switch, while the remaining 3 ports on each server will be connected to the building's intranet (all local, no wan or anything). The second NAS device will be offsite, likely at the owner's residence or some place with reasonable bandwidth.
This plan was hatched in a brief meeting with an IT consultant as a first low-budget step toward a recovery plan. Unfortunately, I was a bit overwhelmed to catch all the fine points about how the VMs would be running on machine A (the 2900) and machine B (the old 2600) would be standing by, at the ready, allowing me to do a "manual failover" should something happen to machine A.
Some software mentioned in the discussion was AppAssure, Symantec Backup Exec, Acronis, & MS Window's own backup utilities.
This is where I need help: I would assume machine A will use vhds located on its own raid array, and some kind of backup operation will keep a relatively current copy of these vhd's on the local NAS device. If the primary server fails, I will fire up machine B, using the vhds on the NAS, or semi-current vhd's from a NAS-Machine B backup-operation. The offsite NAS would do a daily differential backup...or something like that.
*** Bear in mind, none of the information produced in any given day is irrecoverable; regaining operation is more important than recovering data that may be lost by restoring hours-old vhd's, as this type of data is stored on individual workstations and can simply be uploaded again. ***
If anyone could shed some light on how this scheme might work in finer detail (what software, how vhd's are backed-up while being mounted & in-use, whether machine B would use local or network copies of the vhd's, whether the NAS devices should run a raid configuration or not, etc), I'd be all sorts of grateful.
This is new-ish territory for me...boss wants me implement a failover-type plan for the business...with typical constraints: NO DOWNTIME & NO BUDGET!
Okay, not quite that bad, but I'm still in over my head:
Current Situation: One Dell Poweredge 2900 hosting 5 VM's, with NTI Shadow running periodic backups to an external USB drive, swapping USB drives once per week
Goal:
- 30 minute max downtime
- ~5 virtual servers, with 2TB of VHD's (a DC, 2 SQL servers, WWW server & business data)...it's small growth, reasonably static data, the sql server generally only serves ~20 connections at any given time, and the database itself is only 15GB or so, with only a small portion of it (recent changes)
- Dell Poweredge 2900 primary server running Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, hosting with Hyper-V, raid 5, four 1000Mbps ports
- Dell Poweredge 2600 (the old server) for the failover machine, running Server 2003 R2 Enterprise, hosting with MS Virtual Server 2005, raid 5, four 1000Mbps ports
The (inflexible) plan is to purchase 2 NAS devices, dedicate one of the four ports on each server to a private network, such that both servers and one of the NAS devices are connected by a dedicated switch, while the remaining 3 ports on each server will be connected to the building's intranet (all local, no wan or anything). The second NAS device will be offsite, likely at the owner's residence or some place with reasonable bandwidth.
This plan was hatched in a brief meeting with an IT consultant as a first low-budget step toward a recovery plan. Unfortunately, I was a bit overwhelmed to catch all the fine points about how the VMs would be running on machine A (the 2900) and machine B (the old 2600) would be standing by, at the ready, allowing me to do a "manual failover" should something happen to machine A.
Some software mentioned in the discussion was AppAssure, Symantec Backup Exec, Acronis, & MS Window's own backup utilities.
This is where I need help: I would assume machine A will use vhds located on its own raid array, and some kind of backup operation will keep a relatively current copy of these vhd's on the local NAS device. If the primary server fails, I will fire up machine B, using the vhds on the NAS, or semi-current vhd's from a NAS-Machine B backup-operation. The offsite NAS would do a daily differential backup...or something like that.
*** Bear in mind, none of the information produced in any given day is irrecoverable; regaining operation is more important than recovering data that may be lost by restoring hours-old vhd's, as this type of data is stored on individual workstations and can simply be uploaded again. ***
If anyone could shed some light on how this scheme might work in finer detail (what software, how vhd's are backed-up while being mounted & in-use, whether machine B would use local or network copies of the vhd's, whether the NAS devices should run a raid configuration or not, etc), I'd be all sorts of grateful.
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