Acronis product recomendations
Hi all, I have a question on a hypothetical backup scenario: what to use and whether it's even possible.
First, some background: In the next couple of months, we will be moving out of our current office, and moving into two separate buildings. These two offices will be connected by a telco provided VPN.
On each side of this VPN there will be four servers (eight in total), only one set of these servers will be active at a time. They are dissimilar hardware, but running the same sets of applications and services. The idea is that if one of the primary set goes down, its mirror on the other site can be made active with minimal down time.
Now, the question: what I want to do as a backup system is that the primary set of four servers will do incremental backups once daily, and these backups are integrated into the secondary set of servers, the end result being that they are functionally identical (not exact mirrors though, because of the different hardware). Is this possible? and what products would I need to accomplish it?
thanks in advance for the help.
Are you talking about having to set up a windows scheduled task? If that's all I need to do after setting up Acronis, I don't have a problem with it.
Also, would that work with just parts of the files system (just the program files folder for instance)? The reason I ask is that I won't be cloning the primary machine exactly, as in the VM scenario.
Also, with the VMs, is it possible to house them on different physical machines (not two VMs running on the same hardware). The scenario I'm thinking of now is that same as before, but the secondary servers are just hosts for the backed up VMs. Do you think this is a better way of making it work smoothly? The thing I'm aiming for here is as little downtime as possible.
In either case would we need 8 licenses for B&R (4 to backup and 4 to restore) or just the 4 doing the backups?
As I understand, you can't create a restore task to restore from the 'latest' backup and forget about it - when the next day another incremental backup arrives, the restore will be performed from the backup you selected originally. May be it can be solved using echo-style archive naming.
> Also, would that work with just parts of the files system (just the program files folder for instance)?
Possible but dangerous. What if program writes to registry? And if you backup and restore the registry, drivers configuration is also restored from the original machine and you need to fix it.
>Also, with the VMs, is it possible to house them on different physical machines///
Afaik conversion to VM permits this. As for license, in case of VMs, B&R does not perform 'recovery' , but you will need to have one agent that will perform the conversion of archive to VM, and if you want o minimize traffic and transmit only incremental archives every day, it has to be on the other side of VPN connection - so 4 agents for backup here and 1 for conversion there.