Scott Herold wrote a nice article about using upcoming free VMware Server to set up a low cost mirror machines for ESX Server 2.x installations:
…
With VMware’s pending release of VMware Server new opportunities for low cost disaster recovery are becoming available for enterprise environments. Many organizations are looking for a low-cost alternative to building a parallel VMware ESX Server infrastructure at a disaster site. VMware Server is adding an additional level of recoverability to virtual machines that would typically be ignored or delayed in the event of a disaster.Taking a backed up virtual machine from VMware’s ESX Server isn’t as simple as restoring the data to a destination VMware Server system and powering it on. There are slight differences in the VMDK data files that need to be addressed before the virtual hard drive is in a format that is readable by VMware Server. The best part of the solution is that it can be done with a simple text editor…
Read the whole article at source.