Data Recovery/Failover over P-T-P WAN

Eduardo Ramirez · ‎08-12-2010

Hopefully I am wording this decent enough to understand. I am working in a team where we are deploying VMware for a business that has two locations that are connected via a point-to-point wan connection. At each end of that connection they have Cisco Routers. We are virtualizing servers on both ends and using VMware to do Data Replication and keep a copy of each network on each other's server. If both networks on on two seperate subnets and they are being copied over to another VMware machine, where it will be operating side-by-side with the other network (in case of downtime at either site) can I keep things going on the networking side using the routers and EIGRP? My thought is having the disabled copies of the opposite network sitting in the VMware machine disabled, but connected physically to another ethernet interface on the local router (and the same on the other side). When the WAN link goes down, the router switches from routing to serial interface to ethernet interface #2. Is this correct? Thank You.

Eddie

Reza Sharifi · ‎08-12-2010

Eddie,

Since each location is in a deferent subnet, If the WAN link goes down, you can still operate internally. You will not be able to replicated the date to remote location until the link comes back up. So your local network should be fine in each location.

HTH

Reza

Eduardo Ramirez · ‎08-12-2010

Thank You for your response Reza. The data replication will be happening daily, so the servers on

each end of the link will have a fairly recent copy. With VmWare, I would be able to turn that network up on

any side of the link in the case of a WAN link failure or any other disaster with either of the locations. So with the routers, I could also create a failover for this network setup by putting them on an ethernet interface on each of the sites and using a routing protocol to failover as second resort incase the point to point WAN/Serial link goes down right? If so, would EIGRP be the best solution?

Reza Sharifi · ‎08-12-2010

Ok, Can you clarify this?

You are saying, you have 2 WAN links and you want to use the second WAN link as a last resort using EIGRP or do you have only one WAN link?

Eduardo Ramirez · ‎08-12-2010

No I Have One WAN (Point to Point T1) Link between two offices. I am using VMware to virtualize their servers in Site A (main site). In Site B, they traverse the Point to Point Link for shared drives and to RDP into Site A network. Site B has some applications there locally, but not much, most resides in Site A. Site B will also have a server running VMware. Both VM Servers will maintain copies of each other (Site A will have a copy of Site B and vice versa). Using VMware, they will operate as two seperate networks in the virtual environment. One Server with two seperate networks and two seperate LAN (ethernet) interfaces for each. One will be a 192.168.1.0 network and the other a 10.0.0.0 network. Under normal conditions, the backup copies will just be sitting there inoperable, but are available to turn up in case of a disaster. So in normal conditions each of the sites are crossing the T1 to access services stored in the seperate networks. If in Site A and Site B I have a full copy of the other and a ethernet interface on the server, I should be able to make that connection to another Fast Ethernet interface on the router and......in case of a serial link (down) condition, switch over from the serial (point to point) interface to the ethernet interface for communication between the two networks. I would go from traversing the WAN serial link between two different sites (cities) to communicating between two seperate networks sitting in the same box being routed by the local cisco router. Does this make sense?

Eddie