Hi all,
I am wondering if anyone has any experience of running a Windchill 10 System in a VMware environment with Veeam Backup and Disaster Recovery Replication (http://www.veeam.com)configured that they might like to share? Or, whether anyone has any views on the suitablility of such a configured System for Disaster Recovery purposes?
Currently our physical Windchill 9.1 System is replicated to a second set of servers in a Co-Location factility using Microsoft DFS for the Vaults and PTC Loadpoint, DBvisit for automated Oracle Log Shipping and WindchillDS Replication for LDAP.
This system has served us well for the last three years but it takes a lot of administrative effort to maintain both of the Systems and failover is a complex and manual process that takes a significant amount of time.
I want to virtualise our newly upgraded Windchill 10 System onto the VMWare platform this year to gain all the benefits inherent in such a system (snapshots/cloning etc), and it seems to me that Veeam would greatly simplify the administrative effort required to maintain a second Disaster Recovery copy of the System at a remote location, and also improve our Backup System performance by backing up at the VM level rather than at the OS level. Further, it also seems that Veeam could be used to simply generate an always up to date exact copy of the Production System as a TEST environment running in an isolated Sandbox environment (it can retain the same Windchill System name).
If I ran Oracle 11g on a Windows 2008r2 platform, both Oracle and the Windows OS itself are Windows VSS aware, and hence can be quiesced before the Veeam Snapshots are taken so that the OS and the DB can be stored in the VM image as a transactionally sound backup in the VMDK image.
What concerns me somewhat is that the Veeam backup/replication of VM’s does not save the state of the running machine in totality (ie including VMware memory snapshot) – they only snapshot the VMDK so what about the Windchill Java app itself and WindchillDS LDAP – are they going to start OK from a crash consistent VMDK image backup (ie as if started after a power failure of the original host) reliably each time?
Any advice or experience on this type of Disaster Recovery System would be greatly appreciated.
Best Regards
Gary Mansell
