Consideration for building shared storage for VMware environment DR site

Question

I am investigating the of which one is the most preferable choice for DR environment ?

between SAN based replication technology or 3rd party application (Veeam Backup and replication or VMware Site Recovery mgr.)

my current situation is that I have running mostly virtual environment

production environment that is mixed of HP DL 380 and Blade servers with EMC Clariion CX4-500 FC-SAN planning for DR environment that uses the same server model but still thinking of which SAN technology that we could use for the replication between the two sites ?

The DR site is not necessarily to be as fast as the current production and the SAN doesn't have to be EMC

Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I can't speak on Veeam Backup and replication or SRM yet, but may I suggest vReplicator? For replication I have been using vReplicator, a third party solution, by Quest software/Vizioncore. It has been working great for the past 3 months. The software uses CBT (change block tracking) and gives you a couple different replication methods (differential or hybrid). The software is also DRS and HA aware, so the job will continue if there is a guest migration.

The software can alert to a mailing group, our backup group, if a failure occurs and if the remote/local SANs are filling up.

Answer 2

I been using Veeam in our HP dl380 environment for 2 years now. It works perfectly across all networks, hardware, and host os. I have everything on VMWare and as long as your replication site is in VMWare you can use whatever hardware you want. I currently run a three tier system using Veeam backup onsite, replication offsite, and backup copy over a VPN offsite. I looked at the SAN replication, but the issue there is you usually have to the same SAN hardware at both locations which can be expensive. I would highly recommend Veeam, it's reliable, quick to deploy, and easy to use.