Exchange Disaster Recovery/Backups

Yea but I wont be able to get the budget for a 20k SAN, or possibly even 2 of them, one at each site....
I need a lower cost alternative..
 
Well, the most obvious answer, if you can make it work, is a big beefy server at each site, direct attached storage and doubletake or similar. This depends on getting doubletake working properly which seems to be beyond me and virtually everyone I know. However it's the product which is designed to do this sort of thing and has been around ages.

All you should need is a variation on that theme and you'll have a solution. Unless you have heaps of users, in which case you need a bigger budget.
 
Dont get me started on budgets........

The say "We want a DR solution, with all systems restored ASAP"

I say, "What is the budget?"

They say "We don't really have any money......good luck!"

I'm tempted to buy a few USB pens and make them do their own backups. :mad:
 
rainbow6six said:
Dont get me started on budgets........

The say "We want a DR solution, with all systems restored ASAP"

I say, "What is the budget?"

They say "We don't really have any money......good luck!"

I'm tempted to buy a few USB pens and make them do their own backups. :mad:
Click to expand...

:D :D
 
rainbow6six said:
Dont get me started on budgets........

The say "We want a DR solution, with all systems restored ASAP"

I say, "What is the budget?"

They say "We don't really have any money......good luck!"

I'm tempted to buy a few USB pens and make them do their own backups. :mad:
Click to expand...

LMAO. That made me laugh though, even though its bang on the money.

Andy
 
bigredshark said:
It's a fantastic solution but it's not really backup or DR in my opinion, it's more an additional facility before you get to restoring backups or DR. Great for recovering an email somebody accidentally deleted or recovering point in time mailboxes for compliance but less useful in an actual disaster where you still need your backups or DR environment.
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Sorry thats only part of it as a nice bit of extra fluff. We also have two filers that snapmirror to each other at different sites. Exchange is virtualised too with further ESX servers over at the other site. We don't backup the actual VM image of exchange that often though, as its tricky to do VM based snapshots whilst its all running as the timings are a bit on Exchange.
 
VBN said:
Sorry thats only part of it as a nice bit of extra fluff. We also have two filers that snapmirror to each other at different sites. Exchange is virtualised too with further ESX servers over at the other site. We don't backup the actual VM image of exchange that often though, as its tricky to do VM based snapshots whilst its all running as the timings are a bit on Exchange.
Click to expand...

Lots of options out there as mentioned at the end of the day.

Though I'm not a fan of virtualising exchange generally (too many people are busy virtualising stuff simply because they can) and I would caution not to regard snapmirror as a solution for exchange replication, it's not synchronous enough and you'll get a corrupt datastore. Specialised solutions like doubletake are more reliable (not that doubletake is terribly reliable unfortunately)
 
we are now planning to use hyper V and virtualise exchange with it being copied daily to our other DC incase of DR.. Would you say this a good way to go?
Would it be better to use something to just copy the exchange datastore or the whole os? I have not used double take, you say it's not that reliable but is there something better?
 
You need something inexpensive such as EMC Symmetrix at Prod and DR with flash drives, SRDF/S and Replication Manager and Kroll.

EMC end of quarter tomorrow. Will do you a deal. 2 Mil?
 
bigredshark said:
Lots of options out there as mentioned at the end of the day.

Though I'm not a fan of virtualising exchange generally (too many people are busy virtualising stuff simply because they can) and I would caution not to regard snapmirror as a solution for exchange replication, it's not synchronous enough and you'll get a corrupt datastore. Specialised solutions like doubletake are more reliable (not that doubletake is terribly reliable unfortunately)
Click to expand...

I use SnapManager for Exchange the NetApp plug in works like a charm
 
bigredshark said:
Though I'm not a fan of virtualising exchange generally (too many people are busy virtualising stuff simply because they can)
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That seems a bit short sighted, especially given the benefits - why would you not be a fan of virtualising?

I moved our old Exchange 03 server which was on an old DL380 G3 w/2gb RAM to a Win2k8 VM with Exchange 07 and 6gb RAM on new Sun X4440 servers with 2 x 1.9 Opteron Quads and a Sun iSCSI SAN.

Performance? Better
Resilience? Better
Manageability? Better
Scalability? Better
Energy Costs? Way lower
Support Costs (hardware warranty)? Lower

There's still some outdated views on virtualisation here ("OMG SLOW!"), just wondering if there's something I'm missing.
 
iaind said:
That seems a bit short sighted, especially given the benefits - why would you not be a fan of virtualising?

I moved our old Exchange 03 server which was on an old DL380 G3 w/2gb RAM to a Win2k8 VM with Exchange 07 and 6gb RAM on new Sun X4440 servers with 2 x 1.9 Opteron Quads and a Sun iSCSI SAN.

Performance? Better
Resilience? Better
Manageability? Better
Scalability? Better
Energy Costs? Way lower
Support Costs (hardware warranty)? Lower

There's still some outdated views on virtualisation here ("OMG SLOW!"), just wondering if there's something I'm missing.
Click to expand...

I'm fine with virtualisation when it's appropriate, not just for the hell of it which is what everybody seems to be doing.

Performance isn't better if you're running a exchange setup of any size, we use a pair of DL580s for exchange backend for each of our global regions - when you're buying servers that big, loosing 10%+ of the performance to hypervisor is counter intuitive.

Resilience isn't necessarily better, migrating VMs is one way but exchange clustering works well these days and doubletake (when it's working) is a powerful solution too. Either are better cross site solutions as they avoid worrying about SAN replication in the background which just doesn't work well with Exchange.

Managability is questionable - it's another product and another layer of the solution to manage. I now need experience in managing a hypervisor which I didn't before and I haven't removed the need for any of the other experience.

Scalability - I'm not sure that it is really, any size of exchange solution is going to need servers dedicated to it really.

Energy costs haven't changed much, virtualisation is actually costing us more in power, blade chassis love power and having virtualisation capability seems to encourage people to deploy more machines. Because a small business with 5 servers they barely used can save power doesn't mean everybody can - believe me, current power consumption at one London facility is close to 1500 AMPs, if I could reduce it cost effectively I would because it costs an awful lot of money.

Support costs haven't significantly changed for what we've virtualised either. There is less hardware to cover but it's higher end and more expensive, added to which we now have support costs from the hypervisor.

I've nothing against virtualisation on the whole, I've a major problem with people pretending it's the solution to every problem and believing every bit of marketing vmware put out. In some situations it works and works well, there are systems we have which are much better for being virtualised and have removed major worries in terms of DR. That doesn't mean any and every workload should be virtualised though.
 
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