Relications with VMware

[Jen Sheehan]

I've been using VMware for year but I've never had to setup replications before 2 servers and I'm not sure where to start.

I have used Veaam and nakivo for backup,  But never have I worked wtih replications.  I am building a test lab today with 2 servers.

 

The test eviorment is 1gb fiber to 1.5gb down and 500 up.

I'm having a tech install VM 6.7 ESXI free on 2 servers as I type this.

Our production environment  will be 1gb fiber to 1gb fiber.

The productions environment will have about 1.2 TB of dat and about 10-50 GB changed daily.

 

We currently aren't able to jump into paying $4-5k a year for replications.

 

We need to be able to have the offsite on and avaiable if the main server fails.  Where do you recommened starting.

I will review all recommendations. 

[Lurick]

You'll generally need something like Veeam or Navkio (I've worked with both as well) to do this with their replication suite if you don't have something through your current hardware vendor and I say that because, depending on the hardware vendor of the servers being used they might have something native such as with Cisco's Hyperflex hardware where you can do replication between two clusters with the Hyperflex GUI or something similar with HPE's SimpliVity as well.

[revpuk]

You mention ESXi free on the test stuff... if you're using standard or above on production, that includes vsphere replication. It will just integrate into your VC under the site replication plugin. 

[Guest willies leg]

Keep it simple, use your storage to do replication.

Put your VM's on a storage server/volume using freenas/iscsi or heck even nfs on top of zfs.

Then use those to do a storage snapshot (not vmware snapshot) and replicate those volumes.

You'll have crash consistent replications.

 

On the replica, just browse to the datastore, then add to inventory, boot it up, bada bing bada boom.

 

No need for extra software, no extra complexity.

You'll want to do a storage server anyway, even locally, so you can do vmotions etc.