Thursday, June 6, 2013

My DR Project

Over the years I've messed around with many different disaster recovery ideas at the company I work for and none of them were a very solid plan until I discovered visualization with VMware. Since then I have about 98% of my servers running as VMs across 4 ESXi hosts. This gave me a whole new bunch of options when it came to DR. My first attempt was using SAN replication to my DR site which was taking way to long over a slow WAN link, but then Veeam backup and replication software came into my life. I started using Veeam software to do my nightly VM backups to a Netgear ReadyNAS device. I started messing around with Veeam replication jobs and did some tests to my DR site which has two ESXi hosts. Once I got all my severs replicated to the DR site everything was right with the world. Since creating that first replication job I've learned a few more tips and tricks and decided to trash my replication job and redo it. After some research I decided to setup a new Veeam server at my DR site to handle the replication job and leave my old Veeam server as my nightly backup machine. I'm currently making a copy of my Veeam backup repository onto a 4TB external HD which I will be taking to my DR site to use as a seed for creating the new replication job. Should be fun.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

My VMware test lab is starting to come together

Well my VMware test lab is finally starting to come together today. I got my first of two HP Proliant ML110 G6 servers with 16GB of RAM up and running with ESXi 4.1. I had some initial problems installing VMware as it would not recognize the CD drive in the Proliant. I solved that by using an external LG USB CD drive and that worked fine. More to come with my test lab adventures.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Building a VMware home test lab

I've recently started gathering up used equipment to start building my VMware home test lab to help me study for my VCP exam. eBay is a great place to pick up items on the cheap to build your lab. Here is a list of things I've been able to gather so far.

2 HP Proliant ML 110 2.4 Ghz QC (Need to upgrade the RAM on em first though)