Disaster Recovery Options With VMWare ESX Server

Friday, 23 June 2006 by Michel Roth

Virtual Infrastructure 3 is a more than just a leap and a bound ahead of ESX 2.x and the competition. The options that is has now are things we have been wanting and needing, so VMWare has listened to the feedback people gave. But one frustrating thing is how the Disaster Recovery aspect of VMWare has not really changed. In fact I think it has been neglected, and let me explain.

Disaster Recovery in ESX 2.x was no easy achievement if you wanted to setup failover to another site with minimal data loss. There are lots of different ways to perform a disaster recovery setup with VMWare and below I will outline a few. If you are looking for ideas on how to do DR with ESX then this may help you.

The basic premise behind disaster recovery is to have the smallest amount of data loss and the smallest amount of downtime possible between the disaster and the restoration of service. Keep in mind that this is normally this is based on agreed SLA's with the business. Depending on what SLA's are agreed upon, resourcing and budget constraints you may choose different options. I have tried to list the most common setups that are used in a VMWare environment.

Read on here.