[darkvision]

I'm uber drunk and want to help people with their PC problems,(scary right?).

But I've either solved all poster issues, or someone else has solved them. This can be an old issue your IT department ran into, or a new user looking for a fix. I just want something to do as I continue to drink.

p.s. if it is a new issue and you wish to wait for confirmation from another "known", reputable, sober IT, I understand. But, I assure you, being drunk does not interfere with my troubleshooting process.

[Curlyben]

Well I have an interesting VMware problem that needs attention.
How are you with virtualised environments ?
To make it more interesting we're talking about a dedicated virtual system on 2 physically different sites.
Both have hosts and storage and we want to be able to fail over to the back up hardware without the end users noticing.
Thinking Vmotion and the redundancy tools in VMware

[darkvision]

Ty for the reply :) though now I'm sober.. ended up passing out, weee.

Well the easiest way to make another system or virtual environment become the main after failure is to simply set them up as windows servers as that is built in functionality (in other words say DC1 and DC2) If you need specifics on how to do that id say it would be much easier to simply have me log into the systems once set up to set up that functionality(assuming your using windows server). The reason I say that is setting up windows server(nt on up) can be rather involved and would be hard to walk through on just forums. If your attempting to do that on just base models windows frankly I'm not sure how, but I would be surprised if their wasn't some 3rd party software to add that functionality to say windows 7, so I would try a Google search for that.

As a side note on setting that kind of feature up, if you have trouble getting to the 2 separate physical locations you may not want to do that, because when a failure happens(power outage, internet goes down etc) to your main site your backup site will become your main and when your original DC1 comes up they will create havoc with each other and whatever your trying to do. You actually have to bring your dc2 offline and go back and change a lot of stuff to set it back up as dc2(their is no automated process I know of currently that will automatically set it back to dc2 when dc1 comes back online). The reason that is a issue for physical access is that when dc2 becomes dc1 for whatever reason it takes over everything that is dc1 (it changes its ip to that of dc1 etc), as well make sure when doing something like this that you ALWAYS bring down dc2 BEFORE dc1 and when coming back up bring up dc1 then dc2(make sure you can log into/have logged into dc1 before starting to boot dc2). Basically unless your doing this for a business where the redundancy is needed it can/will cause more headaches than its worth.

As far as the data transfer goes(keeping dc2's files the same as dc1's) again that is built into the windows server environment once properly set up.

I realize this is all rather general but I haven't set up a server from scratch since server 2003 and I forget where every single detail for each piece is. Though I can say that most of what you will need to set up for that is done while loading windows server to the system(setting your ips, that its dc1 or dc2 etc) if you need more detail or have questions about what I said let me know :)

[Curlyben]

Sorry I forgot to mention, rather rude really, this is our Linux based Progress Db ERP system ;)

We were using a replication product, but it turned out to be a one shot deal.
Once it had failed over it couldn't be reset.
Also we already run a large VMware ESX environment and have good knowledge there, hence the idea of using that functionality.
It's not the same as a DC failover situation ;)

Windoze, yep can make the burgers sing. *Cough*MCSE/MCDBA*Cough*
Linux ERP not so much..

[NeedKarma]

... this is our Linux based Progress Db ERP system ;)

I just popped in to wish you good luck. :D

There aren't any specialized forums populated with nerds that play with that stuff? You'll be hard pressed to find someone here.

How about ProgressTalk.com

[Curlyben]

Yeah even our "consultants" from the ERP firm are scratching their heads on this one.
As I said the replication software that is on it simply refuses to reset, otherwise that would be the plan.
We have even tried building a test rig to see if it would work and no go...

[darkvision]

Ah yeah then I don't think I will be much help I have plenty of unix/linux experience but its all on DoD distros with very specific functionality. Windows I can do anything... linux not so much... just never had the passion for it that I do windows. Mainly because I like the challenge of doing what windows says I cant. So yeah... view your man pages? :P also id say for something like that just Google up some linux forums, should be able to find the help you need that way. Well gl :)

[Curlyben]

More VM than linux but fun none the less.

[darkvision]

Oh just thought of something as I was watching a movie that might work for you. Load windows server on your systems then do virtual machines loaded with your linux, that should allow full redundancy of your information, but I don't know how well it would transfer the "host" properties too the linux environment.