appreciate the skepticism. i need to get the architecture and concept correct for the furutre, and i think there's better than "microsoft certified" it people here that know the needs of small physican office.

i'll give the setup a go in my home lab. am pretty resourceful i don't need handholding, if it's that bad i'll bail and call in the pros (and gladly pay them). if i'm sucessful i'll gladly share my hopefully simple, cheap, yet robust setup with others.

replication is new tech being baked into even 2012 essentials. its free as is hyper-v. run hyper-v on a basic server, connect a replication from your existing vm (microsfot built in products as of r2!) - it does incremental replication so small amounts of data, set on schedule of your choosing q 15 -20 q 30 q 4h whatever. then you have a "replica" vm with restore points that can be brought up on your backup server in about 10 minutes with a few commands. i'm sure someone that knows more can explain better. one can obviously see the benefit- who cares if its your hdd or power supply fails on the main server - fire up the recent replica on the backup server and fix it at your leisure. the prerequisite for replication is a virutalized server. hence my queries on architecture.

so my proposed setup is:

server 1 main - assume adequate hardware - running essential 2012 r2 on bare metal(can't do replication would add later after virtualization)

or server 1 main - running hyper-v or essential 2012 r2 hyper-v with essentials 2012 r2 as vm

and box 2 - server 2 same or cheaper entry level server box (or i7 workstation) running hyper-v (free) connected as replication target to box 1 (free part of microsoft server/hyper-v). only fire the replica vm in case of box 1 crash/failure. shouldn't require any license of other software. only running 1 instance of essentials, either primary on box 1 or replica vm fired on box 2 after box 1 failure.

max downtime assuming box 1 and 2 dont fail concurrently ~ 15 minutes.

that would be my definition of simple robust and (pretty cheap)

what does everyone think? workable?

larry

Larry
Solo IM
Midwest