Remote Site, Dual Server Replication for failover

[rlboyd]

I have a remote site with 2 physical servers with ESXi 4.1 vSphere Hypervisor running on each one. There is 1 VM running on each of them (different from each other). I'm wanting to achieve the lowest cost reliable backup/replication between these 2 so that in the event of physical hardware failure, we can switch the failed VM over to running from the other ESXi server. Because of the small size of this setup we don't want to pay for vCenter. We want to be able to regularly backup/replicate each VM to the other ESXi storage environment or potentially to an external NAS device for ease of recovery while waiting for hardware service. The WAN connection to this site is very low bandwidth, so backup / restore using central site resources is impractical.

It looks like Veeam could be an ideal solution if we can keep the costs low.

Do you have any comments or suggestions based on experience with Veeam that would give me a feel for how easy this can be done and what issues I may need to watch out for?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Robert,

Well.. if I were you I would deploy backup server on the remote site and scheduled replication jobs from one host to another. In addition to this, I would use the cheapest NAS device as destination target for the backups. Having this device would allow you to transfer backed up VMs to any location and restore the VMs with any Veeam backup server pretty quickly.

As to the management and reporting side, you can use Enterprise Manager on the main site to control your replication/backup jobs.

Thank you.

[rlboyd]

Thank you Vitaliy.