In the previous post we installed VMware Site Recovery Manger and now we need to do our Site Setup.

If you notice, now that SRM has been installed, the vSphere Web Client now has a Site Recovery menu in it.  (If it doesn’t, log out and back in)

From here, we can go into the new SRM menus.

Site Pairing

Once you’ve gotten to the SRM Menus, we’ll want to click on Sites to configure our Sites.

Note: If you see the error below, this means that you’ve got an SSL Certificate mismatch between the SRM Server and the vCenter server.  If you use custom SSL certificates for vCenter, you must use them on your SRM Installation as well.

Assuming all your installations have gone well, you’ll see a screen like the one below.  Click the “Pair Site” link to get started with the site configuration.

Enter the vCenter information for the remote vCenter.  This will pair your site with the opposite site and create a relationship between them.

If you are using the default VMware certificates, you’ll need some login information entered.

If you are using custom SSL certificates from a certificate Authority, login information is not needed.

Once Site Pairing is done, you’ll see two sites in the SRM Sites menu

Resource Mapping

Now that the sites are paired, we can setup mappings for the relationships between the two sites.  This includes Resource Pools, Folders, and Networks.

Open up one of your sites and you’ll see a helpful “Guide to Configuring SRM” menu.  We’ll go right down the list by selecting the Create resource mappings.

Select a relationship between the protected network and the recovery network.  Once you’ve created your relationship click the Add Mappings button to add it to your mapping list.  When done, you can click the check box to create the same mapping in the reverse direction for fail back operations.  You can select a many to one relationship here, but if you do, you won’t be able to select the Reverse Mapping option.  Click OK.

Now we can click the “Create folder mappings” link in the guide to create a relationship for the virtual machine folders.  Repeat the process we did for resources, only this time for virtual machine folders.  The same rules apply for many to one relationships.  Click OK.

The next mapping we’ll need to do is for networking.  Map a network in the protected site to a recovery network.  Don’t worry about IP Addressing yet, we can customize this later, but you’ll need to know what network the virtual machines will map to during a failover.

Placeholder Datastores

The next section of the “SRM Configuration Guide” is to create placeholder datastores.  These datastores hold the configuration information for the virtual machines that are to be failed over.  Think of this as a .vmx file that is registered with vCenter without disks.  During a failover this virtual machine becomes active and the replicated virtual disks are attached to it.  This datastore should not be a replicated datastore, and does not need to be very large to store these files.

Configure the placeholder datastore.  Select one or more datastores to house the virtual machine files.  Click OK.

Once done, you’ll want to go to the other site and configure a datastore for it as well.  This is so the mappings are already done if you fail over and want to fail back.

Summary

We’ve now installed SRM and configured the sites.  We can now start looking at setting up replication and protection groups in the next post.