alen teplitsky (3/9/2011)
GSquared (3/9/2011)
alen teplitsky (3/9/2011)
the pro's of vmware is that you ship the entire instance to DR and just mount it on your DR vmware host and change the IP. no need to mess with logins or anything else. assuming you have dynamic DNS everything should work in 15-30 minutes since the instance is just a bunch of bits on your network that can be moved between any vmware serverYou're assuming you have (a) the bandwidth to ship it, (b) the server(s) it's hosted on are still up and available to ship from, (c) you have the time to ship it.
None of those will be applicable if you are dealing with, for example, a fire in the server room, or a power outage you weren't actually prepared for, or your SAN dies because of a 2-disk failure in a RAID 5 array.
VMotion and other virtual machine movement solutions are really most applicable for moving virtual machines around in the same data center if one of a set of blade servers (or something similar) fails. That helps with a very specific type of DR, but it's pretty much useless in other types.
all the big SAN vendors have DR solutions where you keep a second SAN at a remote data center and they will ship your data there automatically. EMC's is called SRDF. you ship the data and it can be set to run automatically so your DR site is always up to date. at the DR site you have to have vmware servers and you just mount the instances and change IP's. it's so easy you can do it from starbucks.
vmware just came out with a new DR product that runs on top of srdf and other vendors' DR solutions but i don't remember all the details. vmotion is not DR, it's only high availability
vmware and the MS hyper-v is so fast now that if you want good DR and have a SAN, just virtualize SQL and ship the entire instance to your DR site. it's not even worth it messing with mirroring or log shipping anymore
your SAN DR may not always be up to the minute data but if you have a real emergency like a fire in the data center your first priority is to get up an running as fast as you can with whatever you have. you can try to get your up to the minute data later.
Really? It's changed that much since last April?
That's the last time I tested a VMWare DR solution to a remote location. Across a high bandwidth connection, it took 6 hours to get the databases up and running at the co-lo. Replication took under a minute, to the same co-lo. Maybe my system engineers just didn't know enough about VMWare, but that was a real result of a realistic test. (Untested DR is just a waste of time and money.)
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
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