profile syncing / VM imaging

[smithster]

First ill give you my situation so you can understand what i want,

My company hosts one of my clients DR sites. I'm currently using double take to replicate the production servers etc

I have a VM box set up at my company office which is running 10 personalised copies of XP, one for each important PC at my clients office.

Currently there is no automatic sync occuring between the users PC at work and at the DR site.

Ideally i would like some imaging software that would keep updating the VM PC LIVE but this is where i run in to my first problem.
The DR site is on the same domain so if i use imaging software to keep an exact copy of the PC im going to get conflicts as there will 2 same named etc PC's on the network. DoubleTake can do this i know but its bleeding expenceive and not really an option i want to look at for desktops. Now, does anyone know of imaging software that would let me do something like this but have the PC named as something different? Ive tried Ghost and Acronis. I need it to keep imaging on the fly but have a different PC name.

Now if i couldnt find any imaging software to do what i want then i was thinking to use something to just replicate the users profiles and if any new software was ever installed i would just have to manually install it on the VM PC also.

Another possibility was to use the VM converter tool thing (sorry cant remember proper name for those of you who know what im on about) to take live images from the users PC each night onto a usb disk and then if the users PC died i could plug the usb into a spare pc and boot up on to the users VM image

Any ideas anyone? my brain has become a bit clogged thinking about it all so if someone knows of some software that will do this for me please let me know!! dont mind paying for it as long as its not upwards of £1k

[MRX]

Since your budget is so low, virtualization in this manner might not be the best option for you.

It's a little bit of a hack, but you could just run virtualized windows desktops (using xen or something cheap), and just take copies of the desktop VM images every night, via ntfs or whatever.

[smithster]

Since your budget is so low, virtualization in this manner might not be the best option for you.

It's a little bit of a hack, but you could just run virtualized windows desktops (using xen or something cheap), and just take copies of the desktop VM images every night, via ntfs or whatever.

this wouldnt give me a like for like copy of the source machine though would it?

Each PC is different, has different apps and user settings. I was just looking into using robocopy with vss as this would allow me to copy open files etc but then there is the issue of duplicating the registry?

at this point in time i think im going to take an image using VM p2v of the source pc's and upload them every week/month or whatever and then set up normal syncing using some simple sync app for the profile files each nights. i will also take a new image each time a new application is installed or major update applied. this should at least give the user a pretty up to date pc, minus maybe a few settings they chaged which are stored in the registry/program files etc.

has anyone used the Hyper-V stuff yet? what options does this give me to do with my problem?

[MRX]

this wouldnt give me a like for like copy of the source machine though would it?

Well, if they are really that critical - I'm suggesting that the source machines themselves be virtualized via xen.

You could then remotely pause them each night, create a copy of the VM's and then resume.

What kind of environment is it though, that warrants such a high level of redundancy for user desktops?

It seems a little silly to be trying to copy desktops into your DR environment, rather than using roaming user profiles, centrally storing files - or even using a solution like citrix metaframe, and centralizing the application environment (which would be much easier to duplicate over at a DR site).

[smithster]

the environment isnt that its vital to keep up and running, its the client just having the money and wanting to be able, if something goes wrong to be able to switch over to a DR desktop that will be as close as possible to their original PC.

Im not to clued up on citrix metaframe, but each user has specific apps that are configured specifically for them. they have plugins for IE and Adobe that are specifically set up tyo allow them acces to financial websites and documents.

Copying user profile data isnt the big issue, its more the applications and when they change, when one of their plugins gets updated its a change that occurs in the system files not in the user profile folder so this would not be duplicated to the virtual PC via your normal syncing methods.

also, i havent used xen before, whats the process in getting that up and running? your saying xen is a virtual environment on the users PC (source) which overnight could be paused, an image taken and copied to another PC on a VM box also running xen?

[MRX]

OK well (without spending lots of time researching this in any more depth).. the more elegant, Citrix solution would be:

http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/produ ... tID=163057

That way you would just centrally store the virtual desktops, back them up, transfer them to your DR site, yadda yadda.



If your client has money - that's the more scalable (and supported) option (of these two).

The idea with Xen is that you run a light weight linux distro, with X windows on all of your source desktops. This doesn't get touched. In fact - I would probably create mostly read-only file systems, with a r/w file system for logs, swap files, tmp etc, and the VM images. Since you are dealing with existing desktops, you would need to make images of their disks via a block copy tool (like dd) (dd if=/dev/hda<source> of=/my/path/to/images/desktop1.iso etc). This whole process is covered by the tool set provided by Citrix (if you choose to go with that option).

Once you're up and running, you would create a remote batch job (could be local, via crontab too), and use the xm (xen manager) cmdline tool to do:

xm pause <vm-name-here>

Once the state is saved, you can then copy the image off via nfs over ssh, or something, which can be resumed at your DR site.

Word of warning about Virtualization though - that you may run into Windows activation problems, so make sure you do some test cases, before migrating the whole environment

[smithster]

looks good,

ill read into it a bit more tomoz and then ill propose to the guys in my team. have untill next wednesday to get some ideas together for the meeting with client.

cheers

[MRX]

Welcome..

Let me know how it all works out!

[Morg]

If you're considering virtualisation you should also look into VMWare's VDI.

[smithster]

might have found an easier option,

after messing around for a while with the p2v i found you can create the sysprep file and autoanswer inf (sysprep.inf) and load that in with the vm image so when you start it up it creates a new "Computer" on the domain with the name you want, logs in automatically with the users profile onto the domain (even though there profile is already there on the image) thus not creatuing confilcts and keeping all the data! then i can just set up something like syncback to sync favourites etc inbetween each imaging. and its all free (as we already have the VM box and licenses)

[recruit]

Yeah thats a nice solution.

I use vmwares free esxi for my blades and have the VHD's on a nas sent over via iSCSI to each VMhost.

Ideally i would like some imaging software that would keep updating the VM PC LIVE but this is where i run in to my first problem.

For what your talking about.. the size of the xp installs would not be that big and depending on how your site is made up you could just send the vhd's/images over the WAN using rsync or windows viceversa every night to a backup store at the DR site. But this depends on is you have a wan in place etc etc.

As long as a server with vmware[or equivlent] is setup at the DR site then access with say ..terminal services it would enable rapid diastor recover problay before the punters got to the second site.

Out of intrest if its DR, what does it matter if the netbios name of the XP hosts are replicated, both will not be on live at the same time? But you've solved it anyway - ten points to Smithster!

Oh and btw 50 Citrix Licences just knocked my company back £17k. Ouch!

[JazzyJay]

Ever tried VirtualBox? Win runs smoothly on a Linux box