Srm on The IT Hollow

VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.5 Guide

Mon, 04 Nov 2013 14:02:37 +0000

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 Architecture SRM 5.5 Installation SRM 5.5 Site Configuration SRM 5.5 VM Replication Configuration

SRM 5.5 Array Replication Configuration

SRM 5.5 Virtual Appliance Replication SRM 5.5 Protection Groups SRM 5.5 Recovery Plans SRM 5.5 Bulk IP Customizations SRM 5.5 Test Recovery SRM 5.5 Recovery SRM Gotchas

Official Documentation Links

SRM 5.5 Release Notes SRM 5.5 Compatibility Matrix SRM 5.5 Documentation Center SRM Port Numbers SRM Product Page

Are you Prepared for Disaster?

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 14:10:58 +0000

Disaster Recovery has never been easier to manage than it is right now. Virtualization has given engineers a tremendous tool to allow us to almost effortlessly move workloads between datacenters. Now that we’re virtualizing workloads, we’re now capable of standing up exact copies of our servers in two offices and have them up and running in very short RTOs.

In the past year we’ve seen two major storms hit the East Coast causing severe power outages as well as making commutes difficult or impossible for users to get to work. Thanks to the cloud we have many more mobile users than we used to and even if they’re not considered mobile, their servers may not be located in their office. Cloud presents some great options for disaster recovery that should be taken advantage of, no matter what your geographic location. If you’re in a SMB and you don’t have a DR plan, GET ONE NOW!

Lowering Disaster Recovery Costs with Site Recovery Manager

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 14:04:40 +0000

Setting up a disaster recovery site can be a costly endeavor. VMware Site Recovery Manager has made disaster recovery much simpler, but it’s still expensive to get a DR site up and going. Rack space, power, cooling, bandwidth, storage and compute can all add up pretty quickly, not to mention that hopefully you’ll never have to use this equipment.

Replication Bandwidth

Bandwidth could be very expensive depending on how much data needs to be replicated. Consider some of these techniques to make the best use of your bandwidth.

VMware SRM Gotchas

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 02:14:01 +0000

I recently presented my current employers DR Strategy at the Chicago Vmug and had several comments about the gotchas section so I thought I’d get them on the blog for future reference.

During our DR Test we found several items that need to be carefully considered when doing a failover to a secondary site. It is my hope that this post provides a good starting point for considering your own DR Strategy using VMware Site Recovery Manager.

Poor Man's SRM Lab (Whitebox)

Thu, 03 May 2012 12:32:17 +0000

I really wanted to test out some VMware Site Recovery Manager scenarios and realized that buying SANs, servers and networking equipment was quite expensive. I also didn’t have a lot of space in my house that was available for running all of this equipment. After completing my VCP5 I was given a copy of VMware Workstation 8 and thought that I might be able to build a nested virtual environment, where the ESXi hosts themselves were virtualized inside of workstation. (Don’t worry, virtualizing a virtual host doesn’t warp time or space, it’s safe.)

VMware Replication Setup for Site Recovery Manager

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:21:22 +0000

Recently, I wrote a blog post about how to setup and configure VMware Site Recovery Manager for vSphere 5.0. This setup included using array based storage replication to transfer data and it ignored the new VMware replication engine that is included with Site Recovery Manager 5.0. This post is intended to cover the setup and configuration of the vSphere replication.

If you’re not familiar with it, the vSphere Replication Management Server handles individual replication of powered on virtual machines, to a secondary site. This is a free vSphere appliance with the purchase of VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0. Traditionally, vSphere required that the storage providers were replicating the virtual machine data for SRM to work, but that has all changed with 5.0. Now VMware can do the replication for you.

VMware Site Recovery Manager Basic Setup

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 17:23:49 +0000

Finally, the idea of running a Disaster Recovery test is manageable. VMware Site Recovery Manager combined with vSphere has made it possible to test a failover to a warm site without worrying that the DR test itself will cause an outage.

Setting up Site Recovery Manager and performing a site failover sounds like a daunting task, but VMware has made this very simple, assuming you are familiar with vSphere already. If you already have a virtual environment setup at both your production site and a secondary site, SRM is pretty simple to get started with but allows for almost any DR Plan you can think of to be run.