We're talking about cloning our Windows server for fail over purposes. Anyone done this? Any details would be appreciated.

Also, how does licensing work? Do we need a new NetExpress license? What about other licenses?

What about BSI?

Soooo many question :)
Thanks

Cloning how? Not sure if I can answer any of the other questions but I was curious as to what you would use.

We use Ghost in house to clone the drive. A fly got into our cloning machine and since then we've had a bionic fly roaming around messing things up so we have to use Ghost :D sorry couldn't resist.

I've replicated many Windows and Linux systems using 'g4u'.

g4u ("ghost for unix") is a boot-CD that allows one to easily clone PC hard disks by using FTP. The boot CD offers two functions: it uploads the compressed image of a local hard disk to an FTP server, and then it can retrieve that image via FTP, uncompress it, and write it back to disk. As the hard disk is processed as an image, any filesystem and operating system can be deployed using g4u. Easy cloning of local disks as well as partitions is supported.

No fuss - no muss. It thinks you just pulled the primary drive from one machine and stuck it in another.

I use 'g4u' to create backup images of all my machines to a 'FreeNAS' (Free Network Attached Storage) box with a couple terabytes of raided drives, then I can rebuild or redeploy them at my will.

G4U Project FreeNAS Project

Okay so here's an update:

It works like a charm.

We cloned (ghost) the array and made another identical server for DR(Disaster recovery) and there were no issues at all.

I really recommend every client do this. We now have a server 1200 miles away that's always identical to the server we have here on site. At any point if our building gets wiped away we're good to go within 20 minutes. After Katrina I saw many clients lose everything.

The software we're using is called DoubleTake (By NSI). Pretty amazing how it works. Basically it does RealTime replication. So the way it works is, you basically create a clone of your server using ghost or whatever cloning utility you have. Then you turn off the services on the cloned server. Then you replicate your SQL database, GEN, Print directory, work directory or any other files and directories using DoubleTake.

DoubleTake then sits between the OS and the Disk and transmits EVERY change to those files you're replicating to the DR server. It sounds like it'd take a lot of processing but it doesn't, this software is pretty amazing.

Anyway, then you setup some scripts to do some DNS magic when the fail over actually happens and you're set. We tested it today and it worked like a charm. :lala: