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Some companies have built out their disaster recovery site with a stretched layer 2 network or even a disjoint layer 2 network that shares the same IP addresses with their production sites. This is great because VMs don’t need to change IP Addresses if there is a failover event. This post goes over what options we have if you need to change IP Addresses during your failover. Network mappings SRM 5.8 has a wonderful new way to manage IP Addresses between datacenters. Prior to SRM 5.8 each VM needed to be manually updated with a new IP Address or done in bulk with a CSV template (show later in this post) if you had to re-IP your VMs. Now with SRM 5.8 we can do a network mapping to make our lives much easier. This is one of the best new features of SRM 5.8 in my opinion. ...

A recovery plan is the orchestration piece of Site Recovery Manager and likely the main reason for purchasing the product. All of the setup that’s been done prior to creating the recovery plans is necessary but the recovery plan is where magic happens. When we go to the Recovery Plans menu in Site Recovery, we’ll see the option to click the notepad with the “+” sign on it to create a new recovery plan. ...

SRM Sites and resource mappings are all done. It’s time to create some Protection Groups for our new VMware Site Recovery Manager deployment. A protection group is a collection of virtual machines that should be failed over together. For instance, you may want all of your Microsoft Exchange servers to fail over together, or you may want a Web, App, Database Tier to all failover at the same time. It is also possible that your main goal for SRM is to protect you in the event of a catastrophic loss of your datacenter and you’re concerned with every VM. It still a good idea to create multiple protection groups so that you can fail over certain apps in the event of an unforeseen issue. Think about it, if your mail servers crashed but the rest of your datacenter is fine, would it make sense to just fail over the mail servers, or the entire datacenter? Just failing over the mail servers would make sense if they are in their own protection group. ...

If you plan to use Array Based Replication for your SRM implementation, you’ll need to install and configure your Storage Replication Adapter on your SRM Servers. The SRA is used for SRM to communicate with the array to do things like snapshots, and mounting of datastores. Pair the Arrays Once your SRAs have been installed in both your sites and you’ve gotten the arrays replicating, you’ll want to pair the arrays in SRM so that they can be used for protection Groups. Open the “Array Based Replication” tab in the “Site Recovery” menu of the web client. Click the Add button. ...

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. ...

SRM Installation Prerequisites Database Prerequisites Before you are able to install SRM, you’ll need a database to store configuration files. Create a database on your SQL Server to house the configuration information. Note: You’ll need a database server in both the protected site and recovery site; one for each SRM Server. Pre-create the SQL Database and assign your SRM Service account AT LEAST the ADMINISTER BULK OPERATIONS, CONNECT, AND CREATE TABLE permissions. Ensure the SRM database schema has the same name as the database user account. The SRM database service account should be the database owner of the SRM database The SRM database schema should be the default schema of the SRM database user. On your SRM Servers, install the SQL Server native client for your version of SQL Server. Create an ODBC connection to the SRM database on your SRM Servers. Select the SQL Native Client appropriate for your database server. ...

VMware Site Recovery Manager consists of several different pieces that all have to fit together, let alone the fact that you are working with two different physical locations. The following components will all need to be configured for a successful SRM implementation: 2 or more sites 2 or more Single Sign On Servers 2 or more vCenter Servers 5.5 2 or more SRM Servers Storage – Either storage arrays with replication, or 2 or more Virtual Replication Appliances Networks It’s worth noting that SSO, vCenter, and SRM could all be installed on the same machine, but you’ll need this many instances of these components. ...

During the process of setting up a new vCenter Server in my lab, I ran into an issue adding SSL Certificates to my vCenter services. I followed my own blog posts about how to do this so that I wouldn’t miss anything, but nevertheless ran into an error that took me quite a while to get fixed. After creating all my certificate requests using the VMware SSL Automation Tool, I updated my SSO with my custom certificate without issue. The next step is to make sure the Inventory Service trusts the new SSO Certificate, which also went without a hitch. ...

Upgrades for the vRealize Automation software (formerly vCloud Automation Center) seem to be coming quite often these days. This post gives a quick overview on how to upgrade your current environment to the latest release. Of course for official documentation, please check out VMware’s documentation for details. vRealize Upgrade Instructions Pre-Install Steps Obviously you should ensure that you’ve got backups in the event something catastrophic should occur. Be sure to grab a backup of the IaaS database, and snapshot your vRA appliances, as well as any of the servers running the IaaS components such as the Model Manager, DEM Workers, Orchestrators and Agents. For this guide, we have a vRA appliance, and a single IaaS Server running the rest of the components. A separate SQL Server is housing the database. ...

PowerShell is an amazing tool that has limitless potential for Administrators, Engineers and Architects to automate routine tasks or do reporting on things their system management applications aren’t built for. Whenever there is a task to be done on multiple systems and it might need to be done more than once, I find myself reaching for this valuable tool. The problem with PowerShell, just like a programming language is that it can be intimidating to get started. This post is to give you a basic understanding of what you’ll be getting into before you start running PowerShell cmdlets. ...