Disaster recovery with virtualisation

[sidewinder]

Often hear about people using Virtual Server/VMWare to create virtual copies of critical servers and it seems a really good idea.

 

I use Virtual Server a LOT for testing but I have no idea how you would go about recreating a production server on there? I mean I know I could back up and restore the system state etc, but is there a more automated way?

 

It seems strange I cant find any guides or anything on how to do this

[pete]

http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/

 

NB: I haven't tried this yet.

[Dos_Box]

I recently used Microsoft VMs to recovery a trashed Exchange Server. SImply use them as normal servers and promote one as a domain controller, and ensure it stays 'current'. Better still, run it on the Microsoft Virtual Server Platform, keep it small and running 24/7 and if the worst happens you can get the single VMN wrapper, transfer it and recreate a domain.

[apeo]

Do you run the Virtual Server on the server or a spare machine?

[CyberNerd]

I use the 'snapshot' feature of free vmware server to do this, only used it in anger once to recover a printserver

[sidewinder]

I assume you're asking Dos_box but personally I wouldnt do that on the server. Theres a chance of losing the "backup" VM as well as the real one that way.

I have an old (well 3Ghz P4) desktop machine with 2GB RAM and a large HD that I use for virtual server, and I'll probably use that for this too

 

Thanks for that Dos_box

[Dos_Box]

Do you run the Virtual Server on the server or a spare machine?

 

It has to be a Server running IIS. VS is free from:

 

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/default.mspx

 

The server can be standalone, but connected to the relevent IP range for your LAN.