September 25, 2013 at 11:00 am
Hi,
We have SERVER A that is here locally. It is a 2008R2 box on Windows 2008R2 Enterprise.
We need to have an exact mirror of Server A in our remote DR location.
Server A is using VMware 5.1.
Technically I can restore to our DR site a cloned image of server A, but server A must have the same server name - which is a problem on the same network.
What's the best method to have Server A database A be a high availability DR server to our remote location server?
There is only one DB that I need to keep in sync. But again the problem is that the remote server needs to be a mirror of server A with the same ip, same server name.
September 28, 2013 at 12:55 pm
I am no VMware expert and may have the terminology wrong but you can definitely vmotion(?) or bring up a virtual server in another location with the same ip address, name, everything if the original goes down.
As its a virtual server this is definitely the way to go to achieve your objectives. Both servers are never up at the same time so no network problems. speak to your sysadmins.
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September 29, 2013 at 8:57 am
The only way to have two servers up and available with the same name is to have 2 domains. The production domain and the DR domain.
In order for that to work, you also have to make sure the domains are fully trusted so any authentication done on prod domain will be trusted on the DR domain.
There is value to having multiple domains - where you can then have a dev/test domain, prod domain, DR domain, etc... This allows for segmenting the servers and can isolate things very nicely. However, in order to be able to do something like this you have to have a networking and AD team that really understand the setup and can manage it.
With that said, it is not necessary to do that to bring up a cloned server. During the cloning process - when the new server is being built your server team can rename the server, setup a new IP address, etc...
This will break SQL Server, but that is easy to fix with a simple drop server and add server.
Note: since this is going to your DR site, you probably cannot do a straight clone. You probably have to export the image and import the image onto the VM farm in your DR site. This requires a server downtime - your server team will need to take the server offline.
Either way - you will need SQL Server down to perform the clone or you may well find that the database files are corrupted and unusable.
So, as a DR strategy this doesn't work - for DR you will need to look at mirroring, log shipping or SAN replication as options. But, you can do any of these once you have a server setup in your DR site.
Jeffrey Williams
“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.”
― Charles R. Swindoll
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October 7, 2013 at 6:46 am
Thanks Guys.
Jeffery we are going the two domain route.
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