physical2virtual.backup
a simple idea of including virtualization into your virtual disaster recovery plan
Short intro
You are having multiple servers that needs to be backed up and you don't know how to resolve that process? If you are already running virtual servers or just thinking running virtualization, you want to explore how virtual machines facilitate virtual disaster recovery and planning.
Long.introduction
I will here describe whole process of implementation of virtual servers into your current network infrastructure. With virtualization you will
get virtual failover servers and you will have fresh replica of all of your important data, so in case main servers failure you will have
fast disaster recovery plan that just works. Of course you can have clusters in your network infrastructure but what is the cost of
managing clusters and paying licenses for that expensive kind on in stable software.
There are always savings into hardware and power consumption, imagine now you need to have one physical for every server you
own if you want to have good disaster recovery plan, with this you can have dozen of backups on the same server and you will run only
backup that is needed in case of the disaster.
big.picture.of project
Main sense of whole project is to keep employees work without interruption caused by server hardware. This process provides low cost failover solution without datacenters or clusters or expensive special hardware and software.Please note that this project is not best for all server backups, the best would be to contact me with extensive network, servers and data types information and I will suggest is this good solution for you.
Why I am doing this?
I am writing this article to help system administrators implement backup vmware disaster recovery system cause backup is very important segment of every network infrastructure. As our bosses always want the best and the most cheap solution the only way to do this right is to choose virtualization and virtual servers for backup cause in the start they are giving us big savings in one way or another.
In whole process only free tools will be used and scripts that I have written specially for this needs of virtual backup.
We will be using vmware software VMware Importer and VMware server. Vmware importer will be used for importing data into
virtual machines, and vmware server will be used for managing data that is imported into virtual machines.
.Chapters
I will divide this HOWTO in few chapters:
1. Planned network infrastructure
2. Making copy of physical server into virtual using VMware converter GUI
3. Making copy of physical server into virtual with command line p2vtool and preparing XML file needed for vmware p2vtool
4. Bat script for automation of vmware converter import process
5. Customizing VMware configuration file
6. Running and testing virtual server using cold and hot methods
7. Restoring network configuration to virtual network adapters
8. Automating vmware server take over process
9. Restoring virtual newly created data to new physical servers