Live "Backup" or Disk Mirroring. Windows Server 2012 - backup

We are in position to decide to have 2 sites so when our Main Systems (site1 -- which is Primary location for our businesses) is down, so we have some virtual machines, file servers/file shares, SQL and Exchange in standby on other site (site2 -- secondary location). So we have some sort of backup so we could possibly have whole company up and running so fast we can.
What i want to ask you guys is about "live backup" Servers/file shares.
Do Windows Server have some tools so we can create exactly same copy of file shares on site2. Like fail-over cluster or something? We want that site1 and site2 file shares will communicate and have some sort of contact so when user copy some pictures to Primary file share (//fileshare1), then the secondary fileshare (//fileshare2) or Server, will now that there was been some changes in primary server/fileshare, and it'll copy that picture to site2. Some sort of "live backup" or mirroring.
Do Windows Server have some options like this?
Thanks for all your help!

If you want to use replica of VM as a solution to start replicated VM on the second site during a Disaster Recovery Plan, then this is possible, available in Windows Server (2012 or later) with Hyper-V Replica. This feature has no additional costs, it's included in Windows Server Licence.
This feature allows to replicate VM with a RPO of 30 seconds / 5 minutes or 15 minutes (depending on what you need, your network speed..). VM on recovery site (site 2) are shutdown until you want to use Site 2.
More information on Hyper-V Replica : https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj134172%28v=ws.11%29.aspx
More over, in Windows Server 2016 (that will be release in H2 CY16) there is also a feature to replicate a Windows Volume between 2 serveurs (or 2 clusters) : Storage Replica
More information on Storage Replica : https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt126104.aspx

Related

Hyper-V production checkpoints not being deleted after Veeam replication job on same Windows guest OS

I am running two physical Windows 2016 servers in a clustered environment. The backup solution is Veeam Backup and Replication V11.
I have a replication job that has been failing regularly because the host server isn't merging the production checkpoints after.
I have to manually shut the guest down, wait for the checkpoints to merge, then power it back on. THe replication job then runs successfully but within 1-2 days the same issue occurs and I have to go through the same process again.
The guest OS is Server 2019 core.
The Hyper-V Worker event logs for the FAILED replications only show that the virtual hard disk is being used by another process.
I logged a ticket with Veeam, but they confirmed nothing more than it not being an issue with their software - they can see that post replication, the command is sent to merge the checkpoints.
I would really appreciate any ideas, help, suggestions.
Thank you.

Redis user uses high cpu

My server configuration is 4 GB Memory / 80 GB Disk / SGP1 - CentOS 7.6 x64.
My redis version Redis server v=4.0.11 sha=00000000:0 malloc=jemalloc-4.0.3 bits=64 build=4caa563e40a30492
This server is dedicated to Redis only
From the picture you can see there is a user called Redis and under is user there are two processes which is causing high CPU uses. I have no idea what is the purposes of these two commands. Is this harmful to my server should I keep them??
sysupdate and networkservice seem to be malicious services running in your system. Maybe somehow hackers got into your system and upload some scripts which are taking too much of your capacities. Most probably they are mining. So follow the below steps
stop that services
backup your redis file
restart your server
you can reinstall your redis
better to hire some consultant for hardening your redis server

Unison sync across more than 2 computers

I am currently using Unison across 2 computers (server and laptop). I need to create another connection where I can timely backup my data from server.
laptop <--> server -> backup
Here the connection to backup from server can be unidirectional. Is there any way to accomplish this?
This is a very common thing to do. When setting up Unison across multiple machines, you should prefer a star topology. So if you can, you should run another instance of Unison, along with any backup-related scrips, on your machine where you are storing your backups. It should look about the same as your setup on your laptop (depending on where your backups are being stored).

Windows Server 2008 VM - network services failing

I would really appreciated another perspective on an issue we have been experiencing.
The environment:
We have a small subset of VMs (5 Windows Server 2008 R2 VM's) hosted on a Windows Server 2012 Cluster of 8 Physical Hosts which supports 100's over VMs across various OS (2008/2012 etc).
The issue:
Servers within the subset of VMs experience widespread network SERVICE failures. The failure presents itself as a loss in connectivity for a large number of network related services operating on the VMs (including certain critical network dependant applications).
The impacts:
Server remains online.
Inability to RDP to the servers via Domain Accounts (Local accounts are fine).
Windows event logs associated with Netlogon Failure: Event ID 5719 - This computer was not able to set up a secure session with a domain controller in domain DOWNERGROUP due to the following:
The RPC server is unavailable. This may lead to authentication problems.
Windows event logs assocaited with Group Policy Failure:
Event ID 1054:The processing of Group Policy failed. Windows could not
obtain the name of a domain controller. This could be caused by a name
resolution failure. Verify your Domain Name System (DNS) is configured
and working correctly
Widespread Agent Failure (AV, Monitoring, Application) - Lack of connectivty to centralised management servers.
The resolution(s). Stopping an agent service. Strange however its not limited to a specific agent however if we stop agent A, the server comes back to life, however if we also stop agent B, the server comes back to life with Agent A still running. Restarting the VM also resolves the issue.
Note that these events do not appear on other VMs hosted off the same host at the time of the outage. Also note that the guest is located on the same host prior to, during and after the outage.
We have investigated the suspicion that their may be issues with Dynamic Range Port Allocation with the server possibly getting into a bottleneck state. We have implementedthe "MaxUserPort" and "TCPTimedWaitDelay" registry parameters and have set them to 65k and 30 respectively.
Also note that when an outage occurs, it does not always occur on the same VMs in the group. Often times it is 2, 3, 4 or all servers.
Im really just asking if anyone can see these symptoms and relate to possible causes for our situation.
Any help/discussion would be appreciated.
Well, this turned out to be an interesting resolution.
We discovered that one of our server agents, while not actually showing open ports in Netstat, had over 40,000 handles growing linearly over time.
Had to enable the "handles" column in task manager to be able to see this info.
This was the miracle post...
http://blogs.technet.com/b/kimberj/archive/2012/07/06/sever-quot-hangs-quot-and-ephemeral-port-exhaustion-issues.aspx

Does anyone know of a free solution to perform failover for VMware ESXi?

I would like to setup a free/custom solution to perform failover for VMware ESXi.
The setup is as follows:
2x Physical servers each with independent storage.
For each physical server there are 2x Win2k8 Enterprise servers.
In the case a physical server completely fails, we want the other (for convenience sake we can assign it with a slave role) to resume operation.
For this to occur, we need to somehow do continuous replication of the virtual servers, and in the case of the primary server failing have it take over the IP, start the virtual machines and continue operation.
I am new to VMware ESXi myself, but I am trying to research alternative solutions to the expensive VMware licensing for failover.
Thanks.
Take a look at Veeam Backup & Replication.