Website replication

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Colmeister - 28 Jul 2008 09:00 GMT

Hi,

My company hosts a number of websites in-house using IIS7. We want to
create a 'hot standby' machine in case the main one breaks and
therefore want to replicate the content from the main machine to the
backup. Does anyone have suggestions on what software to use for
this?

Ideally it would be a filesystem watcher, it would only copy content
when it changes. This is because we have a huge amount of images
(approx 1GB of cached images from suppliers of ours) and some software
I've tried spends hours just hunting through all the files to see if
any are out of date.

Thanks in advance,

Colin

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Scooter - 28 Jul 2008 17:01 GMT

At the company I used to work for we used RepliWeb (http://
www.repliweb.com/). Seems the price was right, and tech support was
great. The primary reason we went with it was because we were trying
to not only replicate Windows to Windows, but Windows to Linux. It
can replicate on a schedule, or on demand. Honestly I can't remember
if it would watch the file system and synch on its own or if we had to
trigger it somehow, but surely it does. Worth a look anyway. Good luck.

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Scooter - 28 Jul 2008 17:07 GMT

Oh and I failed to mention, regardless of how it kicks off, it will
replicate a large file system very quickly. We had some 10,000 images
and you could plop a new image down in the image directory, trigger
the replication, and it would be done within a couple of seconds.

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Kristofer Gafvert - 28 Jul 2008 20:45 GMT

Hi Colin,

If you only want to copy content, RoboCopy may do the job. From what i
understand it is included natively in Windows Server 2008 (it was part of
the resource kit tools for Windows Server 2003), so you should already have
it installed on the machine.

Check out the /MON and /MOT switches.

In the Windows Server 2003 resource kit tools you had some documentation how
this worked, it was named robocopy.doc. I don't have a Windows Server 2008
machine right now to check if this same document exists in Windows Server
2008. If not, you can always download it from microsoft.com.

One thing to be aware of though, is that it cannot copy open files. If you
have problems with that (the files you need to move are always opened and
locked by some process), use DiskShadow to create a shadow copy (also
available in Windows Server 2008).

I use RoboCopy on my client machine to backup my data. I have never noticed
any problems with it trying to figure out what to copy and not to copy. So i
think it should work quite nice. It is free, so worth a try.

Signature

Regards,
Kristofer Gafvert
http://www.gafvert.info/iis/ - IIS Related Info

> Hi,
>
[quoted text clipped - 13 lines]
>
> Colin

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Scooter - 29 Jul 2008 15:12 GMT

Robocopy is great, especially for the price. My issue and I'm probably
being a little picky, is that it still has to recurse through the
entire directory structure checking all the files to see if they need
to be copied. If you have a very large file system it can become
frustrating if you're an impatient person. I had a file system with
90,000+ files, and it would take about 30 seconds to run through and
check. But if its running in the background, and you're not just
waiting anxiously for the files to get copied, its perfect.

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Colmeister - 29 Jul 2008 16:46 GMT

Thanks for all your suggestions, I'll check them out.

Colin

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