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Physical or virtual to ESX requirements

Use these requirements if your source is a physical or virtual server, you want to protect the volumes from the physical server or volumes from within the virtual guest operating system, and your target is an automatically provisioned virtual server on an ESX server. This means Double-Take Availability will automatically create the virtual server on the ESX target if failover is triggered.

Source server—The source server can be any physical or virtual server running any of the operating systems listed in the General source and target server requirements.
ESX server—The ESX server that will host your target can be any of the following operating systems. Note that ESX is commonly referred to as the Classic edition and ESXi as the Embedded and Installable edition.

ESX 3.5.x or ESXi 3.5.x Standard, Advanced, or Enterprise
ESX 4.0 or ESXi 4.0 Standard, Advanced, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus

Note:

If you are using the Standard edition of ESX 4.0 or ESXi 4.0, you must have update 1 or later.

If your source is a Windows 2008 R2 server, your ESX server must have version 3.5 update 5 or later or ESX 4.0 update 1 or later.

VirtualCenter—If you are using ESXi, VirtualCenter 2.5 or later is required. Although VirtualCenter is not required for the ESX versions, if you are using it, then you must use version 2.5 or later.

Note:

VMotion is only supported if you are using VirtualCenter.

Target server or virtual recovery appliance—The target server must be an existing virtual machine, known as a virtual recovery appliance, running on the ESX server that meets the following requirements.
The virtual recovery appliance can be any of the operating systems listed in the General source and target server requirements.
The virtual recovery appliance must have the same or newer operating system than the source (not including service pack level).
The virtual recovery appliance must have Double-Take Availability installed and licensed on it.
When you establish protection, the virtual recovery appliance will create a new virtual server, mount disks, format disks, and so on. If failover occurs, the new virtual machine is detached from the virtual recovery appliance and powered on. Once the new virtual machine is online, it will have the identity, data, and system state of the source. Since the virtual recovery appliance maintains its own identity, it can be reused for additional failovers.
Server and network configuration—The source and target cannot both be domain controllers. Only one or the other can be a domain controller.
Ideally, the target should not be a domain controller or host any functionality (file server, application server, and so on) because the functionality will be removed when failover occurs.
If your source is a domain controller, it will start in a non-authoritative restore mode after failover. This means that if the source was communicating with other domain controllers before failover, it will require one of those domain controllers to be reachable after failover so it can request updates. If this communication is not available, the domain controller will not function after failover. If the source is the only domain controller, this is not an issue.