DR site for Unity VM only solution

[ptsao]

I have Unity 4.03 VM solution running everything in one box. Our company is planning to acquire a DR site for all servers/network gear. So we are wondering whether we can get a second Unity server, synchrnoize periodically with the production server, and place it in the DR location.

[lindborg]

The only way to get this type of functionality would be to use DiRT to make backups of your current system and store it off site - other than failover (which requires a "hot" connection to the failover server which I'm assuming is not the case here) this is the only other way to go about it.

There's no special licensing provision for having a "cold standby" system setupl, however, so you'll need to talk to your account team about that - licenses don't "move" across systems, they're tied to one box. You can get a "timeout" license that will run for X days with full functionality you may be able to use for this purpose but again, this is something to bring up with your account team.

For more details on DiRT and how it works, check out its home page here:

http://www.ciscounitytools.com/App_DisasterRecoveryTools.htm

[ptsao]

My customer doesn't want to go the two Fail-over Unity setup because it still poses a single point failure on the one back-end Exchange box. Besides, it won't provide redundancy if they lose the entire site that contains the Exchange server.

If the DIRT method is the only method then we will have to go that route. we will configure a script job that backs up the data and push that change into the DR "cold standby" server.

Can we add to the wish list include a complete Unity DR system for the next version of unity?

[lindborg]

You can request anything you want - just ask your account team to put a PERs request for this in with some details on how you expect it to work (cold standby means different things to different folks).

It's actually more of a licensing request than anything else - Daily DiRT backups and restores gets you most of the way there, is the active license thing that is the hard part - it's trikcy because it's easily exploited, unlike a hot failover box that can "talk" to the primary to make sure it's not being used improperly and such.