Disaster backup server in Data Center

scottalanmiller

Veeam does this, but don't know if it does it with ESXi Free. I don't believe that it does.

scottalanmiller

What are you using for backups?

hubtechagain

i like the thought of moving to hyper v. here's my situation. three identical physical hosts. each host has 2 vms. 2 hosts hold "unique" data. 1 host (that we will be sending to a datacenter somewhere) could be used as hotswap to migrate VMs from esxi to hyper v? how would you folks go about doing this?

Dashrender

Assuming the VMs are running local on the VM host, how do you propose getting the VMs to the DC VM host in the case of a VM host failure, unless you're continuously replicating it (or even replicating it less frequently and are OK with the data loss).

Well ESXi free is the wrong choice.

Get Essentials at least. We used Dell Appassure to backup and replicate and then we can restore the VM to another machine at any of the places with the replications if needed. You could also do this with Unitrends or Veeam. We replicate every 15min to keep each replication pretty small.

@hubtechagain said:

i like the thought of moving to hyper v. here's my situation. three identical physical hosts. each host has 2 vms. 2 hosts hold "unique" data. 1 host (that we will be sending to a datacenter somewhere) could be used as hotswap to migrate VMs from esxi to hyper v? how would you folks go about doing this?

Only 2 VM's per host? What kind of load do those have? Sounds like they aren't really utilizing virtualization to be cost effective.

scottalanmiller

@hubtechagain said:

i like the thought of moving to hyper v. here's my situation. three identical physical hosts. each host has 2 vms. 2 hosts hold "unique" data. 1 host (that we will be sending to a datacenter somewhere) could be used as hotswap to migrate VMs from esxi to hyper v? how would you folks go about doing this?

That makes sense. It hasn't shipped yet? Put HyperV there and move the workloads over one by one, get all four on there. Convert the other two machines to HyperV and bring the workloads back.

Then Veeam for replication.

hubtechagain

thanks scott. i'll give it a go this weekend hopefully

scottalanmiller

I believe HyperV can ship the VMs too without Veeam, but Veeam will be faster with more features.

scottalanmiller

Once you have HyperV you have access to Unitrends and Veeam free backups too.