I love technology and I’m a geek and proud of it 
I’ve got a client that has had a server running on Hyper-V in Sydney and we needed to move it to Brisbane with minimal downtime. Normally I would simply shutdown the virtual machine and copy the VHD over to the new server, but with a 10MB/s WAN connection from Sydney to Brisbane this was going to take days. I solved the problem using StorageCraft ShadowProtect and at the same time proved to the client just how valuable ShadowProtect is in a disaster recovery scenario. Here’s what I did in brief.
- Installed ShadowProtect onto the virtual guest machine in Sydney and created a daily backup using Continuous Incrementals. The destination for these backups was a separate server in Sydney.
- Before we shipped the new Hyper-V host machine to Brisbane, I copied over the base image of the ShadowProtect backup to it. I planned to then copy any incrementals up the WAN to Brisbane
- We shipped the server to Brisbane and set it up onsite. We created the new virtual guest on it and had it boot from the ShadowProtect Recovery Environment ISO.
- I commenced a restore of Virtual machine using ShadowProtect, but I specifically told it NOT to finalise the environment after recovery. This took around 20minutes to restore the 80GB machine, but it was current as at earlier in the morning.
- On the live machine in Sydney, I then performed a last incremental backup and shut it down.
- On the soon to be live machine in Brisbane, I pointed the mapped drive with the source files on it to the Sydney server and recovered the last incremental and ensured I finalised the environment.
- I rebooted the Virtual machine in Brisbane and was then up and running. DNS changes made it work directly and the client was back in business. It was 7 seconds from shutdown of the Sydney machine to having the Brisbane one up and accepting logins.
How cool is that!!!
This was all done using nothing more than the core ShadowProtect product. Had I wanted to automate things, I could have used Image Manager Enterprise license which includes automated Head Start Restore and Replication. We’ll probably do this for the client as part of their larger DR plan to minimise downtime
Awesome.
Hello there, I found your site by way of Google while looking
for a comparable topic, your site came up, it appears to be like great.
I have bookmarked it in my google bookmarks.
Hello there, just was alert to your weblog via Google, and located that it’s
really informative. I am gonna watch out for brussels. I will be grateful should you proceed
this in future. Many other people will probably be
benefited from your writing. Cheers!