Best Practice for Remote Replication?

[P1x3l4t0r]

I currently have a single site warehouse with pfSense as the firewall/router. We are going to open another warehouse soon. The new location will have separate subnets which we can route over a VPN, however, we have one use case that is causing us some grief.

We want to replicate our pertinent servers at Main Office, to the new remote warehouse. In case of a server failure at Main Office, we want the warm rack at remote warehouse to spin up and temporarily take over operations. Therefore I presume we need the same subnet at the Main Office and remote warehouse? I can accomplish that with a bridged VPN, but know that bridged VPN's are not usually implemented for other reasons.

The second scenario we can live with, would be to replicate the servers to the remote warehouse, and then physically retrieve the server from remote warehouse in case of a failure at Main Office, and bring the server back on-site. In this instance we would not want to have to know all of the IP's to change since we will be replicating domain controllers, database servers, application servers, etc.

What would be the best way to accomplish this? Essentially this will be our offsite backup/replication disaster recovery plan.

[PetrM]

Hello,

I'd opt for the first scenario as it also provides faster recovery time which is recommended for the most critical workloads. As far as I can imagine retrieving the server from the remote warehouse can take significant time.

Thanks!

[foggy]

For the first scenario, you can potentially use re-IP functionality and make sure the corresponding routing change are performed upon failover.