Editor’s Note: As of January 2022, iland is now 11:11 Systems, a managed infrastructure solutions provider at the forefront of cloud, connectivity, and security. As a legacy iland.com blog post, this article likely contains information that is no longer relevant. For the most up-to-date product information and resources, or if you have further questions, please refer to the 11:11 Systems Success Center or contact us directly.
There are multiple services designed to back up and replicate virtual machines in your private or public virtual environments. However, very few are able to replicate and protect a physical server. And yet, many companies need to protect both virtual machines and physical servers because of legacy applications running on legacy infrastructure. Double-Take is an agent-based replication software that allows replication between similar operating systems. Because this replication takes place at the OS level, Double-Take can protect physical Linux and Windows servers to a virtual machine in 11:11 Systems’ Cloud environment.
The Double-Take Components
Double-Take uses an agent-based operating system for operating system replication. This means that all of the functionality and processing takes place within the operating system. It is because of this that a physical server can replicate to a virtual server and vice versa. This also limits the number of servers required for replication. At a minimum, Double-Take requires a source server (the server to be protected or migrated) and a target server (the server being replicated or migrated to). Unlike other products such as Veeam and Zerto, you do not need to add proxies, replication appliances, VM managers, or repositories. However, 11:11 does recommend creating one server on the target side to be used to manage the environment. This server does not require a license but allows you to monitor and manage all servers and jobs involved in your Double-Take replication environment. It also helps you revert back from failover tests and push installations to new servers.
This management server does not require an active license to administer the Double-Take environment and can be provisioned with the help of 11:11’s Cloud Services team. 11:11 engineers will be available to help you install the Double-Take console on your server and connect to the other servers you wish to replicate. Essentially, this Double-Take management server will act as the brains of the replication or migration project. From here, the next step is installing Double-Take on the source and target servers. This can be done by manually installing the software on the servers or pushing the installation from the Double-Take management server. For instructions on installing Double-Take, please refer to this document: 11:11 Systems:_Installing_Double-Take
The source server and target server should be similar in hardware specifications as well as operating systems. For instance, if you have a physical server with 2 CPUs, 4GB RAM, a 100GB C: drive, and a 200GB E: drive, you will want to build a virtual machine with the same hardware specs. You will also want to match the OS version, so if the physical server is running Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter, you should have the same OS version on the target server. With the source and target servers deployed and Double-Take installed, you are ready to create a Double-Take replica job.
Replication and Failover
