| Sys Admin Extraordinaire |

2017-01-04 Initial Post

A few months ago I looked into this and could not find much information about it. In theory it seemed like it would work. I even asked two different consultants about it and neither had any experience with this. After testing multiple times, I can confirm that this works.

Goal:

Use existing EMC RecoverPoint (hardware appliance) to replicate entire physical server (OS and data drives) to DR site and then mount the replicated LUNs as RDMs to a VM at the DR site.

Currently the physical server uses a local direct-attached disk for its OS partition. It does utilize SAN LUNs for data so it already has connectivity to the SAN. One of the major tasks is to move the OS partition from the local disk to the SAN and then enable boot from SAN.

Result:

This works pretty much exactly as I expected. The VM boots up into Windows fine. DNS updates the AD DC/DNS server in the DR site and clients are able to access the VM. Failback also works, so any changes made while in “VM mode” will be seen by the physical server.

Why would you want to do this?

If you only have a handful of physical servers and you already use RecoverPoint and SRM to replicate VMs, there’s little justification for bringing in something like Double-Take or PlateSpin since those costs thousands and add more complexity and steps to your DR plan. Yes, you have to manually attach the VMs to the RDMs with my method, but you can prep some of this ahead of time with a placeholder VM so during actual failover it really only takes a few minutes per VM. And you could attempt to automate some of this to make it even quicker.

Hardware and software used during test:

• Server: HP Blade BL460c Gen8 with QLogic QMH2572 HBA and Dell PowerEdge R620 with Emulex LPE1150 HBA
• OS: Windows Server 2012 R2
• Storage: EMC VNX5600 and VNX5200
• Replication: RecoverPoint 4.1.2.3
• VMware vSphere/ESXi: 5.5U2
• Imaging: Macrium Reflect 6.1.1366

High-level steps:

• Configure proper FC zoning, VNX LUNs, and RP CGs in both production and DR sites.
• Install and use Macrium to image the local C: drive to a new SAN-based LUN C: drive.
• Reboot the server and configure the HBA to boot from SAN (this is one of the trickier parts because each HBA vendor does it a different way).

To test, failover the RP CG then attach the replicated LUNs to the DR VM.

I don’t have time to detail ever little step, but any competent storage/server/VM admin will be able to figure them out. The point of this post was to make it known that this does work and is a viable option for DR.

2012-06-20 Initial Post

This VMware KB has instructions for installing ESXi 5.0 on USB drive but doesn't mention upgrading an ESXi 4.1 USB drive.

The upgrade is pretty simple and seems to have worked fine, but now my Virtual Machine Startup and Shutdown settings no longer work. I've deselected "Allow virtual machines to start and stop automatically with the system," rebooted, and then re-selected and rebooted, but it still doesn't work.

Here's how to do the USB upgrade:
Make a CD from the ISO, boot your server off the CD and go through everything like it's a new install and select your USB drive. The installer will detect that ESXi is on the USB drive and give you the option to install (default) or upgrade. You'll get another prompt to confirm the upgrade.

I used this ISO:

VMware ESXi 5.0 Update 1 (CD ISO) Installable
2012-03-15 | 5.0.0U1 | 293 MB | Binary (.iso)

My server is Dell PowerEdge T110. See related post http://sysadmin-e.com/vmware-esxi-4-1-usb.

2012-06-20 Updated

2010-12-22 Initial Post

I've never had a chance to work with any version of VMware at work. My last company was so far behind in its IT strategy that even in late 2009 it had absolutely no virtualization strategy at all. I did manage to set up one Hyper-V server for them so that one department could use it for software testing. Where I work now, they do use VMware, but they don't use them on any of the messaging servers that I support. So once again, I have no chance to work with VMware. (more…)

2010-12-22 Updated

2010-11-19 Initial Post

This was a cool feature that came out in 4.0. Basically you just plug a USB flash drive into the computer, boot with the ESXi install CD and select to install ESXi on the USB flash drive. Aftewards, you can run ESXi from the USB flash drive. This allows you to use all your internal hard drives for storing VMs. (more…)

2011-02-15 Updated

2008-10-15 Initial Post

Per this MS page on 2010-02-07, to run Hyper-V “a 64-bit system with hardware-assisted virtualization enabled and data execution prevention (DEP) is required.” (more…)