Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment
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@scottalanmiller said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@dave247 said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@wrx7m said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
What type of Windows licensing do you have? Replication can be affected by that.
We have Microsoft Volume Licensing and I haven't looked into weather or not we'd have to purchase "double" or not.. I'm not sure but I thought a backup environment doesn't quite count as production.
You need the second site licensed if it is hot, meaning turned on. You do not need anything if it is cold, meaning powered off. Powered off, it's just a backup that's extremely "ready to go".
I found the info I needed in the Windows Server 2016 Licensing Guide and if I understand it correctly, we would need Software Assurance coverage with our licensing, which we do not have. We purchased licenses only (with necessary CALs).
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@Dashrender said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@dave247 said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@wrx7m said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@dave247 said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@wrx7m said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
What type of Windows licensing do you have? Replication can be affected by that.
We have Microsoft Volume Licensing and I haven't looked into weather or not we'd have to purchase "double" or not.. I'm not sure but I thought a backup environment doesn't quite count as production.
I would say "Hot"=Active.
hot/warm/standby environment is more what I'm talking about. I do plan to look into the licensing requirements involved. We have Datacenter for the vmware environment.
I think only cold gets away with no licensing.
That's correct.
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@IRJ said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@Dashrender said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@IRJ said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@Dashrender said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
How are you planning on handling the IP change - I'm assuming each building is in a different IP range, so routing will become an issue - just another piece of the puzzle.
Stop building environments with static IPs period. That is an old way of thinking
yeah, OK - with IPv6, that's not really a thing anyway, right?
(not that IPv6 has anything to do with anything regarding this project - it's just the future way of IPing and brings along lack of static IPs)
I'm not even thinking about IPv6 but yeah having a DNS service that can do health checks is ideal and route to another host when when you spin it up.
This can all be automated using terraform in the cloud and even to alot of extent on prem. For example you could spin up hosts on prem and pull all the ip addresses from your terraform state file for easy import into your DNS server.
On AWS, as soon as terraform creates the instance you build your DNS entry. The old one fails health check and it points to new server. Boom you are done
Right. Using things like Consul for service discovery makes it easy.
Also even just doing automated configs for your load balancers works as well.
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@dave247 said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
I found the info I needed in the Windows Server 2016 Licensing Guide and if I understand it correctly, we would need Software Assurance coverage with our licensing, which we do not have. We purchased licenses only (with necessary CALs).
SA is the standard way to do it. You can do it without SA by double purchasing all the licenses (but not the CALs, no need to double up there. The humans aren't being duplicated.) Obviously, SA is cheaper than that, and that's why everyone goes with SA.
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Of course, somewhere, someone actually doubles up the humans. Those crazy people need more CALs
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@scottalanmiller said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@dave247 said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
I found the info I needed in the Windows Server 2016 Licensing Guide and if I understand it correctly, we would need Software Assurance coverage with our licensing, which we do not have. We purchased licenses only (with necessary CALs).
SA is the standard way to do it. You can do it without SA by double purchasing all the licenses (but not the CALs, no need to double up there. The humans aren't being duplicated.) Obviously, SA is cheaper than that, and that's why everyone goes with SA.
So, in the case with replicating virtual machines through Veeam Backup & Replication and storing those powered off servers on a spare VMware ESXi server would require me to purchase additional MS licensing?
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@dave247 said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@dave247 said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
I found the info I needed in the Windows Server 2016 Licensing Guide and if I understand it correctly, we would need Software Assurance coverage with our licensing, which we do not have. We purchased licenses only (with necessary CALs).
SA is the standard way to do it. You can do it without SA by double purchasing all the licenses (but not the CALs, no need to double up there. The humans aren't being duplicated.) Obviously, SA is cheaper than that, and that's why everyone goes with SA.
So, in the case with replicating virtual machines through Veeam Backup & Replication and storing those powered off servers on a spare VMware ESXi server would require me to purchase additional MS licensing?
Yes and you will have both running simultaneously to do fail over testing
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@IRJ said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@dave247 said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@dave247 said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
I found the info I needed in the Windows Server 2016 Licensing Guide and if I understand it correctly, we would need Software Assurance coverage with our licensing, which we do not have. We purchased licenses only (with necessary CALs).
SA is the standard way to do it. You can do it without SA by double purchasing all the licenses (but not the CALs, no need to double up there. The humans aren't being duplicated.) Obviously, SA is cheaper than that, and that's why everyone goes with SA.
So, in the case with replicating virtual machines through Veeam Backup & Replication and storing those powered off servers on a spare VMware ESXi server would require me to purchase additional MS licensing?
Yes and you will have both running simultaneously to do fail over testing
Anyone know off-hand if I can purchase Software Assurance after already having purchased my licenses? If not, guess we'll bite the bullet and purchase licensing for the warm site + get SA on all future purchases.
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How many VMs are you restoring?
It may be worth looking into restoring into Azure VM replication?
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@dave247 said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@IRJ said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@dave247 said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@dave247 said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
I found the info I needed in the Windows Server 2016 Licensing Guide and if I understand it correctly, we would need Software Assurance coverage with our licensing, which we do not have. We purchased licenses only (with necessary CALs).
SA is the standard way to do it. You can do it without SA by double purchasing all the licenses (but not the CALs, no need to double up there. The humans aren't being duplicated.) Obviously, SA is cheaper than that, and that's why everyone goes with SA.
So, in the case with replicating virtual machines through Veeam Backup & Replication and storing those powered off servers on a spare VMware ESXi server would require me to purchase additional MS licensing?
Yes and you will have both running simultaneously to do fail over testing
Anyone know off-hand if I can purchase Software Assurance after already having purchased my licenses? If not, guess we'll bite the bullet and purchase licensing for the warm site + get SA on all future purchases.
I don't believe so.
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@dave247 said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@IRJ said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@dave247 said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@dave247 said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
I found the info I needed in the Windows Server 2016 Licensing Guide and if I understand it correctly, we would need Software Assurance coverage with our licensing, which we do not have. We purchased licenses only (with necessary CALs).
SA is the standard way to do it. You can do it without SA by double purchasing all the licenses (but not the CALs, no need to double up there. The humans aren't being duplicated.) Obviously, SA is cheaper than that, and that's why everyone goes with SA.
So, in the case with replicating virtual machines through Veeam Backup & Replication and storing those powered off servers on a spare VMware ESXi server would require me to purchase additional MS licensing?
Yes and you will have both running simultaneously to do fail over testing
Anyone know off-hand if I can purchase Software Assurance after already having purchased my licenses? If not, guess we'll bite the bullet and purchase licensing for the warm site + get SA on all future purchases.
Yes, you often can, but it is more costly.
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@coliver said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@dave247 said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@IRJ said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@dave247 said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
@dave247 said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:
I found the info I needed in the Windows Server 2016 Licensing Guide and if I understand it correctly, we would need Software Assurance coverage with our licensing, which we do not have. We purchased licenses only (with necessary CALs).
SA is the standard way to do it. You can do it without SA by double purchasing all the licenses (but not the CALs, no need to double up there. The humans aren't being duplicated.) Obviously, SA is cheaper than that, and that's why everyone goes with SA.
So, in the case with replicating virtual machines through Veeam Backup & Replication and storing those powered off servers on a spare VMware ESXi server would require me to purchase additional MS licensing?
Yes and you will have both running simultaneously to do fail over testing
Anyone know off-hand if I can purchase Software Assurance after already having purchased my licenses? If not, guess we'll bite the bullet and purchase licensing for the warm site + get SA on all future purchases.
I don't believe so.
You actually can - but only for 90 days after purchase.
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We are just ending this project. The solution they chose was Zerto. We have gear in a colo with an EPL that allows for replication in real time. In the event of a disaster. I enable networking on my vms, change external DNS and we are good to go.
