VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.5 Guide
November 4, 2013
This is a Site Recovery Manager 5.5 Guide to help understand the design, installation, operation and architecture of setting up VMware SRM 5.5
SRM 5.5 VM Replication Configuration
SRM 5.5 Array Replication Configuration
SRM 5.5 Virtual Appliance Replication
SRM 5.5 Bulk IP Customizations
Official Documentation Links
Additional Resources
Follow these people on Twitter if you are looking for some great resources to learn more about SRM.
@Mike_Laverick Author of “Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager” BLOG: mikelaverick.com
@vmKen Senior Technical Marketing Director for VMware DRBC products BLOG: blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/uptime/
Home Lab
Its one thing to read how to do something, but another to get your hands on the technology. I have a post on this site dedicated to showing how you can build an SRM site all within a single host with nested ESXi hosts.
Eric,
Great job on the SRM guide. SRM is great product and I appreciate you putting this key information on your blog as a reference for someone like me who has not had a chance to do hands on.
We are about to start implementing VMware vSphere in our other data center and would like to leverage this data center as a DR site, however I still have some concerns.
Mainly, it seems like when implementing SRM between the two data centers, going with the spanned layer 2 vlans is the way to go, if one has that option. This would potentially mitigate a lot of administrative overhead with re-IPing VMs. But what if re-IPing VMs is not enough? Quite often, client endpoints or DNS records have to be updated to point to the new IP address,
Testing recovery plan, in a bubble network may be somewhat of a challenge when certain workloads depend on AD services, which for one reason or the other may not be part of the recovery plan. Not sure if anything can be done with network isolation rules, etc.
Finally, Duncan and Frank (VMware) wrote a piece on vSphere Metro Storage Clusters (vMSC) http://bit.ly/VS4XGE, which could also potentially be an option for some.
Greg
You are certainly correct about little issue like DNS getting in the way when Re-IPing things. Powershell is likely your friend here. I think SCCM or SCOM might be able to help if you’re a Microsoft shop, but I’m not 100% sure on that one. Do your research. 🙂 sorry.
The testing plan being in a bubble network creates some issues as well. You might write a quick powershell script to clone one of the Active Directory servers so that you can test this out, or create a second recovery plan with an AD server in it for testing only.
A couple of additional posts that might help you on this one are:
https://theithollow.com/2012/02/exchange-split-brain-on-purpose/
https://theithollow.com/2012/04/virtual-routing-for-bubble-networks/
Maybe those will give you a couple of ideas.
Thanks for reading.