DR Plan recipe, just add VizionCore vReplicator

Man, are 100% virtualized environments powerful! I’m working with a small company that is relatively young with their VMware strategy and they wanted to talk about their VMware environment (okay, we wanted to talk to them, but they were very open to the discussion). We found out they had about $15K of budget money they had to use or lose so we started talking about DR. I shared my perfect solution for small businesses needing DR: a server with some fat SATA drives, ESX 3.5 Starter software, and Vizioncore.

They don’t and probably won’t ever have a budget for a 2nd SAN and the replication that comes with it, so we starting talking about the Vizioncore line of products with them. They decided on vEssentials so they could get vReplicator and vRanger Pro (the main reason for the project was VM backup and DR) and since it was bundled, they also went with vCharter Pro. I was on-site for maybe 8 hours yesterday (3 of the hours for a Virtual Center Server migration) and at the end of the day we had vRanger installed and jobs configured, vCharter Pro configured, and vReplicator installed and replicating VMs. In only 8 hours this company went from a 1-2 week RTO with a 24-48 hour RPO, to a 15 minute RTO with RPO of 4 hours!

Would a small biz with only 7 Windows servers ever dreamed of affording DR like this 5 years ago? I was taking it for granted yesterday how easy this is, but when you stop and look back at where we were a few short years ago, this is truly amazing. VMware and VizionCore truly give small businesses a chance to compete with the big boys without having to go broke in the process. VizionCore along with products like Storage Vmotion from VMware and continuous availablity, may just be the death of the SAN in the Small business VMware market. That’s a post for another day, though.