Friday 5 April 2013

Vmware Replication and Backups reviewed


After completing a project to virtualise our infrastructure I have recently undertaken a project to replicate the data from the main site to a data centre.

As part of this project I reviewed a number of different products and techniques and have blogged the following reviews on a products called Double Take and Veeam.

One of the challenges faced in replicating a virtualised environment is the trade off in using an OS in agent style replication against using virtual aware replication techniques. Whilst the virtual aware techniques generally utilise less overhead on the infrastructure they generally require the snapshotting of the VMware vmdks.

 
Microsoft does not support its products where snapshotting is used, in addition to this there is inherent problems with creating snapshots on servers that have high I/O.  In contrast in-agent replication may not have these problems but it does requires significantly more resources in the terms of CPU and memory which can be multiplied if this agent is on many guest operating systems on a host.  As part of this project I came up with a high bridge solution which utilises both technologies to harness the advantages of both  specific types of servers namely high I/O servers such as SQL and Exchange but inherently do not like snapshots to use in agent style replication and where servers had little I/O and little data change such as IIS servers or service type servers we are utilising VMware snapshotting technology. 
 
Please find the reviews here:
 
 
 
 

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