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Basically I have a server running MSSQL, MYSQL, APACHE, IIS, ORACLE, PERL and other windows services. I am looking for some hardware solution that would allow me to clone a server on to a back up and provide some fail-over mechanism. Can anyone point me into a direction for such a venture? What are the hardware needs?

How does the server automatically switch to the other? What is the hardware required?

I am novice in this area.

Proposed Venture: http://i52.tinypic.com/5f56w1.png

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  • how much down time can you afford?
    – tony roth
    Jun 29, 2011 at 20:23

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Wow, you're making life hard for yourself there - all that on one machine?

Anyway, the problem you'll run into is that while all of that is clusterable it's done by lots of other bits of code that will only add to the complexity/fragility of your existing, already non-optimal, setup.

One thing you could think about doing is setting up a pair of virtualisation hosts using either VMWare's ESXi, MS's Hyper-V or KVM. Then build VMs for each of those functions, let the two servers spread the VMs between them both and then setup either a high-availability type system such as VMWare's HA or Hyper-V's clustering capability - or go the whole hog and run them in fault-tolerent mode (if Hyper-V or KVM have those features, ESXi does).

This would be a very flexible and modern way of doing what you need, plus spreading the complexity and supportability of your setup out into a more modular approach.

Of course none of this is free and you need to understand how much instant failover is worth to you compared to pretty quick failover but ultimately that's the direction I'd personally be looking at.

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  • Thanks for your insight. If i was to run VMs and the main server fails I would be in problems. The server runs mission critical services. I am thinking about replicating two physical server via File and Database replications and using double take down for failover ip switching/hostname.
    – Amarnauth Persaud
    Jul 1, 2011 at 13:06
  • But you could set things up to help with outages
    – Chopper3
    Jul 1, 2011 at 13:08
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We achieve your desired solution by using 2 mirrored SANs and 2 ESX host machines in high availability. The storage for the VMs is on the SANs. If there is a hardware failure on the ESX machines the VMs running on that host will automatically fail over to the operable host. The only negative is that the VM will experience a reboot during the fail over. The mirrored SANs allows for either SAN to fail and both ESX hosts will be able to communicate to the functioning SAN.

Hardware & Software used:

  • 2x HP G5 DL380
  • 2x HP Storeworks Lefthand SANS
  • 2x HP ProCurve 2810 Linked via Fiber
  • VMware vSphere 4
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