Best method of mirroring?

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LordCalin

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Oct 5, 2009
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I'm running ESXI 5 from USB, with 2 1TB drives,

I've installed 2 linux guests which worked great for mirroring 2 partitions one on each datastore with mdadm,

Now I need a windows one to provide files / drive shares to a network of 10 machines, currently we use server 2008 for the machine providing the files but really we don't need a full AD/DC just to share files for business vision. I tried samba from another linux install but for some reason the share from samba was rejected by businessvision, so that counts out the easy method.

In total the partition will hold about 5-600GB of information, and we prefer to keep it mirrored, any suggestions? or are we stuck re-installing server 2008 and using it's built in mirroring.
 
You trying to protect against a single drive / datastore failure?
 
LordCalin said:
Yeah, that's the goal.
Click to expand...

Won't work like you hope. When that datastore goes, the vm will freeze. You'll have downtime till you can readd the disk or remove it entirely. :(

What you're looking for is a much requested feature that is being considered for a future release. :)
 
it's not the downtime were worried about... just the data itself, so the vm freezing is fine... and at least with the mirrored datastores I can pull a drive and get things booted again quickly
 
Well, it's a hard freeze, so can't guarantee anything. :) returned as a permanent busy to the guest.
 
If you don't care about your downtime, just your data then why not just back it up? With a single server and RAID 1 your likely hood of the hardware failing is minimal. However if it does and your 2 copies of your super precious data are on the same machine, your screwed anyway.

My recommendation would be Have your 2 linux vms and 1 Server 2008 machine on your ESXi box, then have a 2nd Server 2008 box on a physical machine (can be a crappy old Pentium D box for all I care, just has to work). Have a internal 1TB SATA disk on that machine, and an external disk (say 2TB USB drive) for backup, and use windows DFS to replicate your data. Then backup the second 2008 machine with say Acronis and maybe even have a 2nd USB drive so that you rotate the two offsite every week (or maybe that second drive can be a Mozy or Carbonite account). Now you have your data in at least three places and therefore truly safe.
 
My goal is to reduce the number of machines we have running, doing it that way is just keeping the old machine around...

We already do backups daily to 4 locations, 2 offsite of 6GB of the most critical data... right now it's just finding a way to mirror the remainder so it's a tiny bit safer... I had hoped to use XP and just filesharing since we really don't need the full AD/DC for just 2 of us... but without buying an esxi compatable raid card I guess I have no choice.
 
LordCalin said:
My goal is to reduce the number of machines we have running, doing it that way is just keeping the old machine around...

We already do backups daily to 4 locations, 2 offsite of 6GB of the most critical data... right now it's just finding a way to mirror the remainder so it's a tiny bit safer... I had hoped to use XP and just filesharing since we really don't need the full AD/DC for just 2 of us... but without buying an esxi compatable raid card I guess I have no choice.
Click to expand...

Are you looking to always have a running backup, or would it be fine if you had a backup that say.. refreshed at lunch and at the end of the day?

If you only need to keep a refresh backup, then you can use the very nice MS tool Richcopy and have a scheduled task.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com.../thread/33971726-eeb7-4452-bebf-02ed6518743e/
 
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