Disaster Recovery

discsox · Sat Sep 29, 2012 1:11 am

I am trying to find a procedure for disaster recovery in a non-HA environment with XenServer.
System components: 2 XenServers in a pool accessing a StarWind iSCSI server. All VMs are on the StarWind server on iSCSI.
Should the StarWind server fail or get corrupted, none of the VMs would be recoverable. I understand that I can export and backup VMs but I am looking for a solution to backup the StarWind iSCSI server.
I have read most of the whitepapers which are excellent but they do not address this type of question as far as I could tell.

I understand that I can create full clones from snapshots and those clones can easily be accessed in a Windows environment.
In a XenServer environment connecting to a "new" target will result in not being able to access any virtual machines even if those machines are all available in the new target.

I apologize in case I am missing something really obvious but any help would be greatly appreciated.

Kind regards,

Marcello

Sat Sep 29, 2012 7:55 am

You can configure replication with StarWind. But honestly speaking you should replicate and / or backup VMs (baked data) rather then LUNs (raw data).

discsox wrote:I am trying to find a procedure for disaster recovery in a non-HA environment with XenServer.
System components: 2 XenServers in a pool accessing a StarWind iSCSI server. All VMs are on the StarWind server on iSCSI.
Should the StarWind server fail or get corrupted, none of the VMs would be recoverable. I understand that I can export and backup VMs but I am looking for a solution to backup the StarWind iSCSI server.
I have read most of the whitepapers which are excellent but they do not address this type of question as far as I could tell.

I understand that I can create full clones from snapshots and those clones can easily be accessed in a Windows environment.
In a XenServer environment connecting to a "new" target will result in not being able to access any virtual machines even if those machines are all available in the new target.

I apologize in case I am missing something really obvious but any help would be greatly appreciated.

Kind regards,

Marcello

discsox · Sat Sep 29, 2012 7:23 pm

Hi Anton,
Thank you for your reply. Just wanted to make sure that I am not missing anything basic.

Just in anybody knows of a good way to backup VMs with XenServer let me know. Any hints appreciated.
We currently take snapshots of the VMs and export the snaphots. This is relatively time consuming and recovery time is slow as well.

Kind regards,

Marcello

Sat Sep 29, 2012 7:32 pm

Take a look @ PHDVirtual (if you want only a software) and @ Unitreds (if you need backup storage as well).

I'm not a big fan of their solutions but XenServer is quite a rare beast (we don't backup it @ VM level ourselves,
not a case for Hyper-V or ESXi).

discsox wrote:Hi Anton,
Thank you for your reply. Just wanted to make sure that I am not missing anything basic.

Just in anybody knows of a good way to backup VMs with XenServer let me know. Any hints appreciated.
We currently take snapshots of the VMs and export the snaphots. This is relatively time consuming and recovery time is slow as well.

Kind regards,

Marcello

discsox · Mon Oct 01, 2012 4:56 am

Hi Anton,
Thank you very much for your suggestions. I will check those backup solutions and hopefully one of them will work for us.

Cheers,
Marcel

Mon Oct 01, 2012 9:08 am

Please keep us updated about your progress. Thank you!

discsox wrote:Hi Anton,
Thank you very much for your suggestions. I will check those backup solutions and hopefully one of them will work for us.

Cheers,
Marcel