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Disaster Recovery Restore To VM Daily After Daily Backup
  • Jim Richardson
    1
    We would like to keep both a production server plus a disaster recovery server at a business for use if the production server fails. We would like to fairly quickly be able to revert the business to the disaster recovery server should the production server fail.

    We are wondering if the following would work:
    Backup the production Windows Servers (physical or Hyper-V) to a local NAS as well as to cloud storage each evening. Then restore the backup stored on the NAS to a virtual disk(s). Repeat this process nightly so that any day the business could fall back to different server hardware based on last evenings backup.

    Our hope is that should the server fail one day, that we could quickly boot the disaster recovery server up based on the backup taken from the night before.

    Would this be wise? Is this something that MSP360 Windows Server backup should be able to handle? Could we use the Restore Verification function as a way to verify the successful restore to virtual disk? Any additional ideas or suggestions?
    Jim Richardson Options
  • Peter Falkin
    0
    ↪Jim Richardson

    Hello Jim!

    Thank you for your questions!

    The setup is definitely something that can be used with Server backup license but there some limitations that should be considered:
    1) Our application cannot perform restore and backup at the same time. Thus the production server has to be able to perform 2 backups and a restore a day. Depending on the size of the backup and the network bandwidth the backup could take various time to execute.
    2) It is certainly possible to use restore verification. In the essence restore verification does a partial restore to a virtual disk and tries to boot a VM with the said disk. However since it is a restore procedure it has the same limitation as regular restore. In your case it may significantly increase backup job execution. So I would advise to test it beforehand in order to decide if you could squeeze it into 24 hours time-frame.
    3) Also we would suggest to perform 2 restores to 2 different virtual disks that are scheduled every other day. This would allow you to have a restore point from a previous day while restore is running.

    Please let us know if you have any additional questions.

    Kind Regards,
    Peter Falkin Options
  • Steve Putnam
    36
    Since you have a second server, have you considered using HYPERV replication? We typically set that up for larger clients using their old production server as the fail-over box. Sometimes need to add memory to the old box but it has been a viable solution for our "rapid recovery" requirements for many years.
    Steve Putnam Options
  • Jim Richardson
    1
    Peter and Steve,

    Thank you both for your very helpful responses. I must have overlooked your replies. We will look further into these.

    Peter, using alternating virtual disks sounds like an interesting plan.

    Steve, HYPERV replication looks very interesting too. I presume that this could run in parallel with the daily MSP360 image backup, is that correct?
    Jim Richardson Options
  • Steve Putnam
    36
    Yes that is correct
    Steve Putnam Options
  • Jim Richardson
    1
    Hi Steve,

    Do you know if it is required to license the replication server? This server might go years without doing more than to receive the replication data.
    Jim Richardson Options
  • Steve Putnam
    36
    You need a Windows license for the Hypervisor - but if you are using an old server as the replication target it should already have a license.
    Steve Putnam Options
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