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We need to formulate a plan for disaster recovery a VMWare installation. The components are two ESX hosts and a NAS unit.

We're wondering what everyone here uses for their farm? We have a few ideas but wanted to compare with other system admins.

The scenario to cover would be is one esx host goes down or the NAS goes down, what's the faster way to bring the VMs back online. Fyi, all the VMs live on the NAS.

AKTechops
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2 Answers2

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Use VMware HA for protection against host failure. This requires licensing, but is a fundamental feature of VMware vSphere.

Use backups and/or replication to address NAS failure. Use a software solution like Veeam to accomplish this.

ewwhite
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  • HA is a great idea, I believe we're licensed for that too. I've also heard about Veeam. Thanks for the suggestions. – AKTechops Jan 13 '16 at 15:58
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Use vReplicator if you own a vSphere license, it's free.

You will need another host, but under 3 you are ok with the small vSphere's license.

For the other host with vVeplicator what I do is to have it with a local storage in it, and hosted in a remote building in example. It take snapshot at like each 15min, and you can start the VM on the other host if your farm die.

yagmoth555
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  • I've been looking at VDP which seems pretty great. Have you tried that? – AKTechops Jan 13 '16 at 15:57
  • @AKTechops No. For disaster recovery I love vReplicator, as its fully integrate into a host. I lived a SAN corruption and the longer was to bring back backup from the tape library. reindexing, reapplying to the a blank VM the restore, etc... took one week to recover at 100%. VDP seem a backup solution, be sure you can push a 'play' button to start the VM. The other solution is contained, host & storage. It does not replace backup, but a jewel for disaster recover when uptime is important. – yagmoth555 Jan 14 '16 at 04:01
  • Wow, that must have been a long week. Thanks for the extra details. – AKTechops Jan 15 '16 at 17:04