Greetings
I need to formulate a DRP for a customer and thought that I would ask
the slug for it's collective wisdom.
Customer currently has 3 x HP rackmounted servers runnning Centos 4.8
and a Dell rachmounted server running Windows Server 2003.
Backups are currently done to tape every night using Amanda.
Given the nature of the business and the reliance it places on computer
availability, we're looking at replication and virtualization a a first
step and off-site replication of some sort as step two.
First thought was to max out the memory on two of the servers, one for
normal running and one as a hot or warm standby, and the virtualize all
of the servers onto the two machines. An external consultant has already
suggested doing this with VMware, installing the ESXi hypervisor on the
two main servers and installing a NAS shared between the two systems
(hot and cold) so that if the hot server fails, we can simply switch
over to the cold server using the images from the NAS.
Couple of things concern me about this approach. The first is using
VMWare rather than a GPL solution. The second is where we would install
the NAS. Physically, the office space is all under one roof but half the
building has concrete floors and half has wooden. (The hot server is in
the wooden "main" office, while the cold server was to go in the
concrete floor area. There is also a firewall (a real one) in between
the two areas).
Questions:
1) Can anyone offer any gotcha's, regardless of how obvious they may
seem to you?
2) Is there a GPL solution that fit's this scenario? Even if it's not a
bare metal hypervisor and needs an O/S. Remember it has to virtuaize
both Server 2003 and CentOS
3) What's the minimum connection we would need between the NSA and and
the two servers sharing it?
4) What kind of speed/bandwidth should we be looking at for the off-site
replication.
I'll happily take anything else anyone would like to throw at this -
suggestions, reading matter etc - it's not an area of great expertise
for us having only paddled around the edges with Virtualbox.
TIA
Nigel.
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