IIS, VMWare, DR

Question

We have a number of web servers in our VMWare environment. I am a developer (not a sys admin) so I am not familiar with VMWare, but our IT team currently feels the best way to maintain a DR site is to maintain multiple VMWare servers and each time I make changes in IIS in production, I need to make the same changes on the DR VMWare server. This seems like excessive work as well as risky - considering it requires manual redundant configuration.

Is there a way where we can replicate our production VMWare servers to a DR server, and retain IIS settings, file permissions, etc?

Answer 1

We use Web Deploy to sync our production server across multiple locations.

Answer 2

• Site Recovery Manager allows you to create an entire alternative site on standby.

• But on a local level, placing those servers in a High Availability cluster is pretty standard procedure. If one server goes down, the machines go up in another ESX.

• Fault Tolerance is also a useful feature here, although limited to single-CPU VMs.