Connecting Head Office of a company with a Disaster Recovery site using VM Ware.

[Suhail]

I have a customer who would like to take our data centre facility.

He has his head office located in the same city as our data centre and would like to connect to it. He is looking for data replication and would like his remote offices to connect to our data centre in case the head office connectivity goes down.

How can VM Ware help in replicating the data from head office to the data centre without much downtime considering that they are not co-located but in the same city without consuming much bandwidth?(We propose providing a solution based on satellite connectivity.)

How much bandwidth will this process consume?

Thanks.

[azn2kew]

Seems like he wants Central Office systems to be replicated to your data centers as a hot standby I supposed. It really depends what kind of systems and storage solutions you have in place and the bandwidth between CO->Data center. There are cheap DR solutions that you can implement and especially if its not hot standby it still cheaper. If everything is on a virtual environment, DR solution is way too easy and all you have to worry about is the .vmdk of all the guests which is on the SAN LUNs. If you can have a mechanism to replicated or backup those VMs to data center and then restore when needed would be cheap choice. Asynchronous and synchronous replications requires both source and destination storage to be in place with Storage Replication Adapter to takes place such as VMware SRM for instance.

You can look at storage vendors like Lefthand's Network VSA, SANmelody, Double-Take etc...depend what storage you have right now. You can read about the DR book from www.vmware.com->resources which is very good to read.

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Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant