simple way to duplicate a server with a few VMs to another physical server

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dalearyous

[H]ard|Gawd
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deploying two servers to a remote location. rather than doing shared storage and vmware motion to move the VMs back and forth between physical hosts, is there a simpler cheaper way? i essentially want nightly or weekly duplication of the primary host to the secondary host. the primary host will be running about 4 VMs, all server 2012 and none of them are CPU or memory intensive. 1 physical server is plenty power, just need the second one ready to go in case of failure.
 
What you describe is the very reason for VCenter, etc. As long as you understand the caveats of going the route you are going the easiest thing I can think of is to write a Powershell script to shutdown the VM, rsynch it over to the new host and then start the first host VM back up. Even then you will have some issue or two I bet.
 
so we have a vcenter license but it has a max of 3 physical hosts (which we have already used). if we upgraded and added the two new hosts into vcenter, could the duplication happen without shared storage?
 
You could if you already are licensed for VMware VSA (I think that is the name). It's since been discontinued and VSAN has replaced it.
 
dalearyous said:
deploying two servers to a remote location. rather than doing shared storage and vmware motion to move the VMs back and forth between physical hosts, is there a simpler cheaper way? i essentially want nightly or weekly duplication of the primary host to the secondary host. the primary host will be running about 4 VMs, all server 2012 and none of them are CPU or memory intensive. 1 physical server is plenty power, just need the second one ready to go in case of failure.
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If you want to replicate your VMs to another location without expensive VMware software, you cannot do that on a ESXi level and you cannot do on a file level without shutting down the VMs as you have open files. If you can shutdown, just copy/sync the VMs (Can last a long time with large VMs)

A as simple/cheap as possible solution would be shared ZFS/ NFS storage (opensource). This can even be a local virtualized storage appliance where you can do snapshots and replicate them to another host. This is ultrafast as ZFS snapshots contain only modified datablocks. If you share your datastore also via CIFS, you can access a snap as a second option via Windows previous version and copy/move/clone/backup a VM to another location.

You can do such a ZFS replication down to a minute delay.
Only problem: A snapshot is a state like a hard power off what means that some snaps can be corrupted. You can manually create ESXi snapshots prior a ZFS snap to keep the memory state within the snap. (delete ESXi snaps after the ZFS transfer as ESXi snaps are a performance killer)
 
Veeam replication between the two hosts. Simple, but obviously not free.
 
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