ESXi Replication When will it be avalible?

[lanjo]

Does anyone know when replication between ESXi hosts be available? This was one the of the big selling features when we purchased the product but as you can see from my support question below I can not get a clear release date?

Has anyone been able to get it working??

Thanks
Lance


Hello, Lance

Thank you for contacting Veeam Support.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure about the correct date, but Veeam is working on providing such functionality to the customers, so please stay tuned to our future releases.

Thank you for your time and your business!

Veeam Software
support@veeam.com
http://veeam.com/support/

Product: Veeam Backup & Replication
Product ver.: 3.0.1
OS: ESXi3
Support question: When will the replication for ESXi be avalible?

[Gostev]

Hello Lance, I can confirm that our support answered correctly - we do not have a date for this functionality at the moment. It will not be a part of the next release (4.0), we have been tentatively planning this for the release after 4.0. One thing I can assure you is that this feature remains very high on our priority list.

I am sorry to hear that this feature was presented as a selling point for you, because we specifically mention in product's System Requirements that replication to ESXi is not supported.

Can you please give more details on why do you have to replicate to ESXi (not regular ESX)? It is usually possible to install regular ESX on any computer capable of running ESXi.

Also, you may find this discussion helpful.

Thank you.

[steveanderson3]

We are needing an ESXi replication solution as well. We are planning to put paired ESXi servers with local disk at our store facilities (we don't have money or space for shared storage) We need ESXi largly because of PCI compliancy. The full version of ESX requires a File Integrity Monitoring application, which is expensive to license. ESXi does not require this, in addition, the smaller footprint requires less patching, and less downtime. We have about 70 facilities in which we need to do this.

[Gostev]

Steve - thank you very much for this information, I did not realize there is compliance-related benefits for having ESXi. Can you please describe your environment in a bit more details since this information will help us choosing the best architecture for the solution. Specifically, I am interested in what VMs are you running on those paired hosts (whether they are Linux or Windows), and whether it will be acceptable for our ESXi replication solutions to leverage one of the existing VMs to install a light-weight replication helper agent (very low CPU/memory usage)?

[steveanderson3]

We currently have about 70 store locations, running 3 - 8 physical windows servers. These servers consist of domain controllers, print servers, Point of sale app servers, software distribution, video content distibution, and restaurant applications. There is a possibility that a linux based database server may be moved to these esx hosts in the near future, but for now we are needing to replace the very old hardware that we have. Ideally we'll have 2 ESXi hosts, loaded with local disk, and replicating to each other in the event of a hardware outage. Because of budget constraints, we may have 2 hosts at only the largest facilities, we don't know yet. These will all be reporting to a centralized vCenter server, and be licensed with vSphere 4 standard.

We hope to have most of these vm's running Server 2008 64-bit. A helper application may be ok, I personally wouldn't mind a small self-contained linux/appliance type system if a helper is needed. We are currently evaluating vizioncore's vReplicator, but it does not support ESXi either, and also requires full root access to opened between ESX hosts, which can be another compliancy concern.

I would anticipate you will be coming across more retail-based companies that need to adhere to PCI, and they will be wanting ESXi as well, if for no other reason than its reduced attack surface and patching requirements.

[steveanderson3]

I also meant to add, the links that we have to our remote facilities ranges from 1 - 3Meg, essentially 1 or 2 T1's depending on the site.

[Gostev]

Thank you Steve, this helps!