Need your guys' guidance on a DA/DR project I'm working on. From what I understand, there are 3 possible ways to create an offsite backup for VMware: Replication/HA, Stretched Cluster, and Site Recovery Manager (too expensive for us). Any advice on which one is better for the situation described below?
2 sites with 3 hosts at each location: (2) R630's and (1) PowerVault SAN)
- Each site has identical hardware/software/VMs, etc.
- We don't have a lot of requirements, other than the recovery site needs to come up within a few minutes of the primary site going down. Saving money trumps ease of use & recovery time
- We have a redundant 1GB/s L2 (possible 10 gig if needed) connection between both sites
-If I went with Replication/HA, would I need another vCenter at site 2? If not, would I just use the vSphere client to manage the VMs at the recovery site temporarily?
-Will I need to buy & install additional ESXi on the recovery site hosts for both Replication/HA and Stretched Cluster methods?
-Which one is easier to initially setup?
-Will I need vSAN?
-And lastly, do I need to buy an OS (Win Server 2016) for each logical processor to run ESXi on?
Thanks guys