How to recover your virtual environment using an HP Falconstor CDP and VMWare ESX!
Recently I tasked to create some technical documentation for one of my clients on how to restore and recreate servers replicated to an HP Falconstor CDP.
The clients environment consisted of a multi-site virtual environment running on the VMware ESXi 4.1 platform. Their primary method of off site protection was to use two HP Falconstor CDP devices and have the primary on-site unit replicate to a secondary unit off-site. The CDP device does not do an OS replication, but rather only the data stored on each of the servers hard drives. In the event the primary site was completely lost (for example a fire or flood) the method of recovery would be to recreate the VM’s on an ESX host at the secondary site then re-attach the replicated drives.
The following is a document I created that will show you how to bring up the production servers in the event of a disaster recovery situation. The method used to do this is to create virtual machines (servers) in ESX, and attach the replicated drives from the HP Falconstor CDP device. This will create a bootable server and essentially use the CDP device as a SAN (attached storage).
How to Recover Your Virtual Environment Using an HP Falcons Tor CDP and VMWare ESX
