Hi
I think this is a topic that has been discussed several times, but I'm still struggling to fully grasp the options to design an EV DR solution. My environment will consist of three VMware vm's - 1 x SQL 2008 vm for the EV databases, 1 x EVserver for Exchange email archiving and 1 x EVserver for Exchange journal archiving. Storage will reside on a NetApp array in the production datacentre and there is a second NetApp in the DR datacentre which is connected via a 1Gb link.
The archives are likely to grow to about 50TB+ Indexes up ro 10TB and SQL DB's 500GB
So what are my best options for a DR solution - I want to achieve a low RPO - perhaps losing no more than 15mins of data changes
How 'consistent' does this need to be? Can I create the SQL server and storage as VMDK's and also the Index locations as VMDK's and use VMware snapshots with SRM to replicate this to the DR datacentre? If so, how do I then capture the archive partitions? and do snapshots of the SQL databases, Index volumes and Vault stores need to occur simaultaneously?
I want to leverage the NetApp replication capabilities (snap mirror) and VMware SRM\Storage vMotion but need some guidance on how best to set this up and what the realistic capabilities are when it comes to consistent\inconsistent snapshots etc.
thanks in advance
Keir
