Editing a V to ESX job

From the Manage Jobs page, highlight the job and click View Job Details in the toolbar.

In the Tasks area on the right on the View Job Details page, click Edit job properties. (You will not be able to edit a job if you have removed the source of that job from your Double-Take Console session or if you only have Double-Take monitor security access.)

Because you configured multiple jobs at once when you first established your protection, not all of the individual job options were available during job creation. Therefore, you will have additional job options when you edit an existing job.

Changing some options may require Double-Take to automatically disconnect, reconnect, and remirror the job.

There will be additional sections on the Edit Job Properties page that you will be able to view only. You cannot edit those sections.

Click a link below to see the options that you can edit on the Edit Job Properties page.

General

For the Job name, specify a unique name for your job.

Failover Monitor

Total time to failure—Specify, in hours:minutes:seconds, how long the target will keep trying to contact the source before the source is considered failed. This time is precise. If the total time has expired without a successful response from the source, this will be considered a failure.

Consider a shorter amount of time for servers, such as a web server or order processing database, which must remain available and responsive at all times. Shorter times should be used where redundant interfaces and high-speed, reliable network links are available to prevent the false detection of failure. If the hardware does not support reliable communications, shorter times can lead to premature failover. Consider a longer amount of time for machines on slower networks or on a server that is not transaction critical. For example, failover would not be necessary in the case of a server restart.
Consecutive failures—Specify how many attempts the target will make to contact the source before the source is considered failed. For example, if you have this option set to 20, and your source fails to respond to the target 20 times in a row , this will be considered a failure.
Monitor on this interval—Specify, in hours:minutes:seconds, how long to wait between attempts to contact the source to confirm it is online. This means that after a response (success or failure) is received from the source, Double-Take will wait the specified interval time before contacting the source again. If you set the interval to 00:00:00, then a new check will be initiated immediately after the response is received.

If you choose Total time to failure, do not specify a longer interval than failure time or your server will be considered failed during the interval period.

If you choose Consecutive failures, your failure time is calculated by the length of time it takes your source to respond plus the interval time between each response, times the number of consecutive failures that can be allowed. That would be (response time + interval) * failure number. Keep in mind that timeouts from a failed check are included in the reponse time, so your failure time will not be precise.
Network monitoring—With this option, the target will monitor the source using a network ping.
- Monitor these addresses—Select each Source IP Address that you want the target to monitor.
- Monitoring method—This option determines the type of network ping used for failover monitoring.
  - Network service—Source availability will be tested by an ICMP ping to confirm the route is active.
  - Replication service—Source availability will be tested by a UDP ping to confirm the Double-Take service is active.
  - Network and replication services—Source availability will be tested by both an ICMP ping to confirm the route is active and a UDP ping to confirm the Double-Take service is active. Both pings must fail in order to trigger a failover.
- Failover trigger—If you are monitoring multiple IP addresses, specify when you want a failover condition to be triggered.
  - One monitored IP address fails—A failover condition will be triggered when any one of the monitored IP addresses fails. If each IP address is on a different subnet, you may want to trigger failover after one fails.
  - All monitored IP addresses fail—A failover condition will be triggered when all monitored IP addresses fail. If there are multiple, redundant paths to a server, losing one probably means an isolated network problem and you should wait for all IP addresses to fail.

Failover Options

Wait for user to initiate failover—By default, the failover process will wait for you to initiate it, allowing you to control when failover occurs. When a failure occurs, the job will wait in Failover Condition Met for you to manually initiate the failover process. Disable this option only if you want failover to occur immediately when a failure occurs.

Reverse Appliance

Select the virtual recovery appliance on the source ESX server that will be used when reversing the protection—If desired, select a virtual recovery appliance on your source ESX server. This appliance will be used during the reverse process, allowing you to protect the source replica virtual server on the target back to the original source ESX host. If necessary, click Provide Credentials and specify a valid user on the virtual recovery appliance you have selected. The user must be a member of the Double-Take Admin security group. You can skip this step, however, you must have a reverse appliance selected before failover.
Send data to the source route when reversing the protection—Specify an IP address on the source to route Double-Take data. This allows you to select a different route for Double-Take traffic. For example, you can separate regular network traffic and Double-Take traffic on a machine with multiple IP addresses.

Mirror, Verify & Orphaned Files

Mirror all files—All protected files will be mirrored from the source to the target.
Mirror different files—Only those protected files that are different based on date and time, size, or attributes will be mirrored from the source to the target.

Mirror only if the file on the source is newer than the copy on the target—This option is not available for V to ESX jobs.
Use block checksum for comparisons—For those files flagged as different, the mirroring process can perform a block checksum comparison and send only those blocks that are different.

Enable scheduled verification—Verification is the process of confirming that the source replica data on the target is identical to the original data on the source. Verification creates a log file detailing what was verified as well as which files are not synchronized. If the data is not the same, can automatically initiate a remirror, if configured. The remirror ensures data integrity between the source and target. When this option is enabled, Double-Take will verify the source replica data on the target and generate a verification log.

Because of the way the Windows Cache Manager handles memory, machines that are doing minimal or light processing may have file operations that remain in the cache until additional operations flush them out. This may make Double-Take files on the target appear as if they are not synchronized. When the Windows Cache Manager releases the operations in the cache on the source and target, the files will be updated on the target.

Verify on this interval—Specify the interval between verification processes.
Begin immediately—Select this option if you want to start the verification schedule immediately after the job is established.
Begin at this time—Select this option if you want to start the verification at the specified date and time.
Mirror files to the target server when verifying—When this option is enabled, in addition to verifying the data and generating a log, Double-Take will also mirror to the target any protected files that are different on the source.

Mirror only if the file on the source is newer than the copy on the target—This option is not available for V to ESX jobs.
Use block checksum for comparisons—For those files flagged as different, the mirroring process can perform a block checksum comparison and send only those blocks that are different.

Calculate size of protected data before mirroring—Specify if you want Double-Take to determine the mirroring percentage calculation based on the amount of data being protected. If the calculation is enabled, it is completed before the job starts mirroring, which can take a significant amount of time depending on the number of files and system performance. If your job contains a large number of files, for example, 250,000 or more, you may want to disable the calculation so that data will start being mirrored sooner. Disabling calculation will result in the mirror status not showing the percentage complete or the number of bytes remaining to be mirrored.

The calculated amount of protected data may be slightly off if your data set contains compressed or sparse files.

Do not disable this option for V to ESX jobs. The calculation time is when the system state protection processes hard links. If you disable the calculation, the hard link processing will not occur and you may have problems after failover, especially if your source is Windows 2008.
Delete orphaned files—An orphaned file is a file that exists in the replica data on the target, but does not exist in the protected data on the source. This option specifies if orphaned files should be deleted on the target during a mirror, verification, or restoration.

Orphaned file configuration is a per target configuration. All jobs to the same target will have the same orphaned file configuration.

The orphaned file feature does not delete alternate data streams. To do this, use a full mirror, which will delete the additional stream(s) when the file is re-created.

If delete orphaned files is enabled, carefully review any replication rules that use wildcard definitions. If you have specified wildcards to be excluded from protection, files matching those wildcards will also be excluded from orphaned file processing and will not be deleted from the target. However, if you have specified wildcards to be included in your protection, those files that fall outside the wildcard inclusion rule will be considered orphaned files and will be deleted from the target.

If you want to move orphaned files rather than delete them, you can configure this option along with the move deleted files feature to move your orphaned files to the specified deleted files directory. See Target server properties for more information.

During a full mirror, orphaned file processing success messages will be logged to a separate orphaned file log. This keeps the Double-Take log from being overrun with orphaned file success processing messages. Orphaned files processing statistics and any errors in orphaned file processing will still be logged to the Double-Take log, and during difference mirrors, verifications, and restorations, all orphaned file processing messages are logged to the Double-Take log. The orphaned file log is located in the Logging folder specified for the source. See Log file properties for details on the location of that folder. The orphaned log file is overwritten during each orphaned file processing during a full mirror, and the log file will be a maximum of 50 MB.

Network Route

For Send data to the target server using this route, Double-Take will select, by default, a target route for transmissions. If desired, specify an alternate route on the target that the data will be transmitted through. This allows you to select a different route for Double-Take traffic. For example, you can separate regular network traffic and Double-Take traffic on a machine with multiple IP addresses.

The IP address used on the source will be determined through the Windows route table.

Compression

To help reduce the amount of bandwidth needed to transmit Double-Take data, compression allows you to compress data prior to transmitting it across the network. In a WAN environment this provides optimal use of your network resources. If compression is enabled, the data is compressed before it is transmitted from the source. When the target receives the compressed data, it decompresses it and then writes it to disk. You can set the level from Minimum to Maximum to suit your needs.

Keep in mind that the process of compressing data impacts processor usage on the source. If you notice an impact on performance while compression is enabled in your environment, either adjust to a lower level of compression, or leave compression disabled. Use the following guidelines to determine whether you should enable compression.

If data is being queued on the source at any time, consider enabling compression.
If the server CPU utilization is averaging over 85%, be cautious about enabling compression.
The higher the level of compression, the higher the CPU utilization will be.
Do not enable compression if most of the data is inherently compressed. Many image (.jpg, .gif) and media (.wmv, .mp3, .mpg) files, for example, are already compressed. Some images files, such as .bmp and .tif, are decompressed, so enabling compression would be beneficial for those types.
Compression may improve performance even in high-bandwidth environments.
Do not enable compression in conjunction with a WAN Accelerator. Use one or the other to compress Double-Take data.

All jobs from a single source connected to the same IP address on a target will share the same compression configuration.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth limitations are available to restrict the amount of network bandwidth used for Double-Take data transmissions. When a bandwidth limit is specified, Double-Take never exceeds that allotted amount. The bandwidth not in use by Double-Take is available for all other network traffic.

All jobs from a single source connected to the same IP address on a target will share the same bandwidth configuration.

Do not limit bandwidth—Double-Take will transmit data using 100% bandwidth availability.
Use a fixed limit—Double-Take will transmit data using a limited, fixed bandwidth. Select a Preset bandwidth limit rate from the common bandwidth limit values. The Bandwidth field will automatically update to the bytes per second value for your selected bandwidth. This is the maximum amount of data that will be transmitted per second. If desired, modify the bandwidth using a bytes per second value. The minimum limit should be 3500 bytes per second.
Use scheduled limits—Double-Take will transmit data using a dynamic bandwidth based on the schedule you configure. Bandwidth will not be limited during unscheduled times.

New—Click New to create a new scheduled bandwidth limit. Specify the following information.

Daytime entry—Select this option if the start and end times of the bandwidth window occur in the same day (between 12:01 AM and midnight). The start time must occur before the end time.
Overnight entry—Select this option if the bandwidth window begins on one day and continues past midnight into the next day. The start time must be later than the end time, for example 6 PM to 6 AM.
Day—Enter the day on which the bandwidth limiting should occur. You can pick a specific day of the week, Weekdays to have the limiting occur Monday through Friday, Weekends to have the limiting occur Saturday and Sunday, or Every day to have the limiting repeat on all days of the week.
Start time—Enter the time to begin bandwidth limiting.
End time—Enter the time to end bandwidth limiting.
Preset bandwidth—Select a bandwidth limit rate from the common bandwidth limit values. The Bandwidth field will automatically update to the bytes per second value for your select bandwidth.
Bandwidth—If desired, modify the bandwidth using a bytes per second value. The minimum limit should be 3500 bytes per second.

Edit—Click Edit to modify an existing scheduled bandwidth limit.
Delete—Click Delete to remove a scheduled bandwidth limit.

If you change your job option from Use scheduled limits to Do not limit bandwidth or Use a fixed limit, any schedule that you created will be preserved. That schedule will be reused if you change your job option back to Use scheduled limits.

You can manually override a schedule after a job is established by selecting Other Job Options, Set Bandwidth. If you select No bandwidth limit or Fixed bandwidth limit, that manual override will be used until you go back to your schedule by selecting Other Job Options, Set Bandwidth, Scheduled bandwidth limit. For example, if your job is configured to use a daytime limit, you would be limited during the day, but not at night. But if you override that, your override setting will continue both day and night, until you go back to your schedule. See the Managing and controlling jobs section for your job type for more information on the Other Job Options.

Click Next to continue.

Double-Take validates that your source and target are compatible. The Summary page displays your options and validation items.

Errors are designated by a white X inside a red circle. Warnings are designated by a black exclamation point (!) inside a yellow triangle. A successful validation is designated by a white checkmark inside a green circle. You can sort the list by the icon to see errors, warnings, or successful validations together. Click on any of the validation items to see details. You must correct any errors before you can enable protection.

Before a job is created, the results of the validation checks are logged to the Double-Take Management Service log on the target.

Once your servers have passed validation and you are ready to update your job, click Finish.