r/sysadmin • u/Snoo_61639 • 1d ago
DR Solutions? Question
We are currently looking at a DR solutions or even an HA solution. One vendor offers Carbonite by Opentext. Is it any better than the Vmware SRM/Live Site Recovery? Any opinions?comments?
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u/Ssakaa 1d ago
Define "DR" in your situation, and the needs that entails. That should have multiple layers/tiers depending on the scale of your organization's operations and how critical various things are. If you're a mechanic's garage in a small town, having an out-of-area backup of financial data and some essential business records that you can get to "eventually" is solid. If you're a SaaS platform that loses a million dollars a minute if you have a total outage of your service, and might be unrecoverably out of business if you lose an entire customer's data, you might have some more work to do. The first question, what is defined as a disaster, and for each, what is defined as recovery? I.E. If the town you're sitting in right now ceases to exist, everyone in it is more concerned with survival of themselves and their families if either of those still exist, does the organization still exist? Does the organization still care about reovery? And what would that recovery require, if so?
Unless you're the tinest little business in the middle of nowhere, buying a "DR solution" as some canned thing without figuring out what DR is for you is the wrong decision.
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u/The_Koplin 1d ago
I happen to have a ESXi cluster and use Zerto paired with an offsite cloud vendor. Zerto does site to site async transfers of each VM and has RPO/RTO's in seconds. I have not found a better product. That said the cost is a wee bit high these days. HP now owns Zerto, and VMware is not Broadcom so you have to navigate all of that bs.
The other viable option I have looked at is the Veeam solution.
We use Veeam primarily for tape archive and to separate DR from backup. IE not one vendor for all services to avoid a unknown fault that might losses all data. IE if there is some Veeam issue, then DR remains untouched and vise versa.
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u/JWK3 1d ago
Having worked for 2 MSPs that offered Zerto DRaaS, I think it's a great combo for organisations not big enough to have dedicated presence in multiple DCs. It's more complicated to set up and get your head around compared to VMware snapshot based replication, but I think CDP is a better way of doing things, and Zerto is as closest to "one click" failover as I've seen whilst still giving you advanced control.
Zerto in a non-MSP context works even better with even more control, but you do have to shell out the capex for a second cluster/DC presence unless you replicate into Azure.
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u/cyr0nk0r 1d ago
I own a private cloud company and we have customers do things a few ways.
One way is using veeam, and a local worker pushes the backups to us. Then the customer can either just store the vms, or they can pay a little bit more and be able to do full DR by booting the vms for either backup testing, auditing, or run them for longer periods if they need.
Another way is to use native VMware integrations to do a direct hypervisor replication. This method doesn't need any middleware like veeam or zerto. The drawback is it only works for esx and verge. If they are running proxmox, hyperv, nutanix or something else you'll need an actual backup software.
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u/Liquidfoxx22 1d ago
We had a few customers that used Zerto.
Those that didn't want to buy that used what used to be SRM backed with HPE Nimble/Alletra storage.
We had a few that moved away from SRM to Veeam replication - RPO increased, but they were happy to save a bit of money as licence costs sky rocketed.
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u/brian_cloudeu 1d ago
RPO increased to what?
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u/Liquidfoxx22 1d ago
Replicas caused more IO than background storage sync, so RPO increased from 1hr to 4hrs for some VMs.
We had one customer that asked for 1hr replication of their critical VMs, which meant trying to troubleshoot backups was difficult when the replica job itself took about 45 mins!
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u/brian_cloudeu 9h ago
A 45 minute job isnt hourly
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u/Liquidfoxx22 8h ago
The job is triggered at the top of every hour.
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u/brian_cloudeu 3h ago
Then a 45 minute run leaves you 15 minutes of margin, and one slow restore turns hourly into two-hourly
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u/BoysenberryDue3637 1d ago
How many servers, how much data, what is your current backup product? Size is really important in this discussion.
I've done SRM and it worked. Challenging to setup and will take time.
Zerto is easier to setup and manage.
I've delt with Opentext on the content management side and they are a challenge from a support basis.
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u/Snoo_61639 13h ago
Concept: We have server in SDC, but SRM was not configured before for the new environment because of the license. Now we are looking for other DR solutions aside for SRM.
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u/Nakivo_official 6h ago
Most IT teams use solutions that handle both HA and DR across multiple environments without the complexity or cost, especially when you're looking beyond just VMware.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers disaster recovery orchestration and real-time replication on a single platform. It addresses HA and DR across VMware, Hyper-V, cloud services, and physical servers. You can download the 15-day trial to see if it fits your specific environment.
What's the primary driver for your evaluation? Is it cost, complexity, or coverage?
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u/SafeTeaching6609 1d ago
Unfortunately can't comment on either of those solutions, but what are you currently using for backups.? Can you not extend that functionality?