Please excuse my general ignorance of these multiiple technologies, but I'm trying to learn.
I'm a photographer and my needs don't involve HA, but DR is critical. I'm trying to centralize
both the storage of digital photographs and the installaton/maintenance of software (Photoshop,
a Website etc.) I have several workstations at my office- and I also vpn to the system via the
internet with my laptop (named GYPSY) when I'm working in the field. I attempted using VM
Workstation on a Windows system with attached storage, but it's not smooth. I needed somehting
more Elegant, so...
I have a diskless ESXi5.0 (named ATLAS) running several VMs. I provide ESXi with storage via a
second system (named PHANTOM) running Win7Pro and Starwind iSCSI v5.7 with (currently) 8TB of disk. There are separate NICs
+switch for the iSCSI traffic.
I use one (1) target (VirtualVault1) for all the VM files and several other targets
(PhotoVault1, WebImages1, PhotoLab1 etc) for the data that's accessed from within the VMs.
There's no sharing, each target is associated with a single initiator. I backup the data files
with apps that run within each VM. For example, Copy from the iSCSI target PhotoVault1 over to a
another system Win7 (named GHOSTRIDER). This 'seems' to be working fine.
I have experimented with .img and .ibv(thin/prov) modes and both seem Ok.
Now finally a question
How do I backup VitrualVault1 ? I am running WHS software backing up the C: drive for PHANTOM and each VM to another server (named (SHADOW) but- if I lost the iSCSI
PHANTOM computer and/or disks, it would be a major pain to figure out how to restore them all
from SHADOW after rebuilding PHANTOM. After the VMs were restored, the data could simply be
"copied" from GHOSTRIDER back to the iSCSI targets.
I looked at Snapshot/CDP, but even with the journaling sent to a separate disk, it seems to
depend on the presence of the original. I think it's intended more for "rollback" than for DR.
I could implement a RAID-1 setup, but I Hate them. I would like to find something more elegant
that runs on PHANTOM and copies the .img files to GHOSTRIDER periodically. If I could copy the
.img/.ibv files along with the Starwind config file.... After a disaster I think I could
shutdown ATLAS, rebuild PHANTOM from it's "system" backup, copy back the .img files, stick-in
the old config file and reboot. Yes?
I don't have a good understanding of VSS, but I tried the ShadowProtect software and it fails
trying to backup the partition containing VirtualVault1.ibv. The StorageCraft KB says I have a
disk error and should run chkdsk. Of course that didn't help. But, I "think" the answer is here somewhere
In addition to- "How can I copy my .img files"... I would of course appreciate any other advice
or comment regarding my setuup and methodology. Whew... I'm outta breath.
Thanks, Ed
