Posts made by hubtechagain

Have any 15.1k sas drives?

Is not doing SW. Does not matter.

I only underbought when trying to run all workloads on a single server. The role of the new DR server wasn't always DR. Our other servers are perfectly happy with extra space

Not going the starwind route, doesn't make sense for me as the DR site will in essence be providing me with the same (technically moreish) protection from failure. both site, and vm, or physical host failure on main site. if i wanted to buy 6 more drives, i could starwind it out and have uber ultra super safe mega secure situation.... just dont think they want to spend that right now. maybe a next year project expansion

yes, i said above i'm adding 2 600gb drives and switching from raid 10 to 6. it's a lot to read, but i respect that. each server has more than enough processing power to handle all jobs, just unnderbought storage.

using the hyper v replication, how do the VMs behave? they're offline, replicating, then boom, tree crashes through building and smokes our server rack. i just remote into the DR server and spin em up?

No. We live in hurricane ally. an all out local outage is more likely 4 months of the year than a single server outage

Well, were i to "network raid" my two hosts....I would not have enough space to handle the workload. Pretty sure that separate hosts is the way we need to stay at this client specifically. @Steven sadly you were a bit slow to the game and I think that the boys have me figured out I'm currently using thinware for my local backups. not sure if it works with HyperV or if i'll have to find another local storage backup option to push to the NAS.

WTF is starwind?! ha

considering we were willing to lose a day of data to our DR site.... this will replicate much more often, so this is already better than what i've been thinking.

@scottalanmiller They will more than likely just be two individual hosts. why would I change that up now?

from TechNet
Replication frequency—In Windows Server 2012 replication occurs every 5 minutes. In Windows Server 2012 R2, you can configure the replication frequency every 30 seconds, 5 minutes, or 15 minutes.

That being said, this server will only ever be used if we have a complete physical failure at our main location. this is EXACTLY what i was looking for @dafyre you get atleast 100 nuggets.

Okay, so it's possible we have reached a free (other than my time) means of accomplishing this goal. yes?

I can do all of this on site so tell me if i'm off base or not.

• setup new DR server with 2 new drives and reconfigure to raid 6

• Setup Hyperv12 on DR server

• P2V current VMs to DR host temporarily

• HV 2012 on two "main site" servers

• Migrate servers to their respective hosts

• Setup Replication locally before shipping server to datacenter

• Ship DR server to datacenter

• Allow replication to do its thing?

we have any veeam representation here?

Dustin, is NAUbackup incremental?

so my question is this. wont Xen do this for free? if i'm going to the "trouble" of switching hypervisors, why not go with one that includes the tools i need and client will be happy to not have to pay for licensing. now i dont know xen, but it can't be all that terrible to tinker with.

Network is a VPLS between sites so yeah, networking side isn't tough. technically it's all "LAN" to the hosts.

Dash, you are 1000000% correct.

so hyper v 2012 = hypervisor and is free?

Just to Re-Cap here is our ultimate goal with this client.

Currently we are running and will continue to run server 2008 R2. So Hyper-V would be 08r2 which i've heard nobody really likes.
Currently have 3 hosts, each exactly the same 64GB of ram and 2.2TB raid 10.
Going to re-purpose one host to become a DR server colocated in a datacenter about 600 miles away(not an important detail but whatever).
We want the VMs running on the two "main site" servers to be replicated to the DR server nightly. I dont want to have to log in and start a backup job every night.... I will need the backup to be able to do incrementals because The 3 VMs that i'm talking about moving totaled together for more than the capacity of 1 server, so i'm going to get two more 600gb drives and switch to raid6 on our DR server. So nightly backups of 2+ TB ain't gonna happen, hense incremental after the initial snapshot. I'm now looking for the most reasonable way to accomplish this.

So, do i stick with ESX and get essentials for 666 bucks, and if so what backup do i use?
Do i switch do xen for the cost of me doing the work? if so what backup solution do i use?
Do i switch to Hyper-V 08r2? what backup solution do i use?

Thanks for everything guys!

are there any free/not super expensive options?