Folks,
Currently I am working in a place where one of my many roles is to manage about 15 servers. This wouldn't normally be a problem, but these servers are older than me. I've gotten the go ahead to roll with a VMware infrustructure update project, but this will take a while.
In the meantime I've put together a supercomputer - basically a desktop with 64Gb of RAM and an i7. This box has the ability to run our whole infrastructure (more or less). I've also P to V'd all of our servers, so if one of them goes down I can boot up the VM and all is well.
My question is, what would be a good way of pushing the up-to-date data from our current servers to these VM's in standby? Most of the machines wouldn't need up-to-date data (WSUS, AV, BDC, DB Web, Monitoring Server etc), but some would (Exchange, SQL, CRM, File server, etc). I can push the data needed no problem, but the question is, to where?
Ideally it would be to the D drive of those servers, but I don't want to power them on until the other machine had failed. Is there a way I can create logical D drives that could be accessed in the interim to push data to? Maybe I have one server with a load of attached drives that I could then repurpose as D drives. Does that make sense? I've waffled on a bit.
Any thoughts much appreciated!
Regards
HP