Category Archives: Networking

Backup Exec, Disaster Recovery, Networking, Technology, VMWare

Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity

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A large part of our PCI and SAS70 compliance is to maintain, and test, a comprehensive and viable Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity plan.  As part of this we will be conducting our annual test of the Technology Availability Plan of our DR plan this coming Friday.  A co-worker and I will be flying to Scottsdale, Arizona where our contracted Disaster Recovery Vendor has it’s data-center that is stipulated for us.

For this test we will be testing VMWare and our ability to recover our vSphere environment.  We will have 3 servers in the test.  The first will be a Windows machine that we will use to install our backup environment and restore data from tape.  The other two machines will be ESX servers that we will setup and configure as our VM hosts.  We will then restore vCenter Server from tape as well as several other critical servers that we call “Tier 0”.

Tier 0 for our DR Plan consists of critical servers that are required to bring the rest of our environment back online in a disaster.  These include, Active Directory, Backup, and a few other infrastructure services that are needed before anything else can be restored.

We hope to have a successful test, and also hope to uncover roadblocks before they become issues in a real world scenario.

Networking, Technology

GNS3, my new best friend

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I’ve just been in a Cisco training for the last few days.  The facility is very clean, nice, and the training was very well laid out and valuable.

As I suspect is often the case with these types of environments there were a few technical issues with our lab equipment.  These classrooms are not dedicated to any one class so keeping the gear in the class is impractical.  There are a lot of moving parts and keeping everything straight and running is surely no small task.  The actual hardware is somewhere else and connected to the classroom via the network.  In our class there were issues with the connection to our gear and it was slowing down our progress.

The instructor very thoughtfully had already prepared an environment that would better facilitate the labs.  In comes GNS3.  I had not used, or even heard of, this little gem and I am sorry for it.  GNS3 is an open source “Graphical Network Simulator” that allows you to model network devices virtually.  Continue reading GNS3, my new best friend →