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SRM version 5.8 now is now extensible with vRealize Orchestrator (formerly vCenter Orchestrator). This new functionality was expected since the vRealize Suite is all about automation and disaster recovery certainly needs to be taken into consideration. One pain point I’ve seen with SRM has been the ongoing administration of protection groups. Every time a virtual machine is deployed to a protected datastore, the VM also has to be configured for protection. This usually only consists of right clicking the virtual machine and choosing “configure protection” but is also another thing that administrators have too keep track of. ...

If you’ve got SRM 5.5 installed and you want to get the new SRM 5.8 code into your environment, don’t worry. The upgrade process is pretty easy to manage. The important thing to note is the upgrade order and of course your compatibility matrix. Remember that you need vCenter 5.5 U2 or higher to get SRM 5.8 working. Upgrade Order Ensure your vCenter Server and Web Client are on 5.5 U2 or higher in the protected site. If not, upgrade them! Upgrade vSphere Replication on the protected site to 5.8 if you’re using one. Upgrade SRM on the protected site to 5.8 Upgrade your SRA on the protected site if you’re using one. Ensure your vCenter Server and Web Client are on 5.5 U2 or higher in the recovery site. If not, upgrade them! Upgrade vSphere Replication on the recovery site to 5.8 if you’re using one. Upgrade SRM on the recovery site. Upgrade your SRA on the recovery site if you’re using one. Verify the conneciton between your sites is valid, protection groups still exist and recovery plans are in tact. Upgrade ESXi servers on the recovery site Upgrade ESXi servers on the protected site Upgrade VMware Tools. Install Run the installer on the SRM servers. The installer should detect that SRM is already installed an that an upgrade will be performed. ...

I had one of those serious first world problems where I was intermittently getting poor wireless connectivity from my upstairs bedroom at night. My wireless router is downstairs in my office on the opposite side of the house, and my neighbors’ wireless was also causing some interference. So I was about to get out my chainsaw to start taking out a wall and part of my upstairs floor, when I thought “Maybe a wireless extender would work for me?” ...

A customized recovery plan means the difference between hoursdays of reconfiguration of your environment in the event of a failure. VMware SRM allows for lots of opportunity to customize your recovery plans with scripts and modifications along the way to ease the management of your disaster recovery plans. Run Scripts from SRM Server If we open any given recovery plan we can click on a step we’d like to modify and then right-click to “Add Step…” ...

Setting up some alerting is a good idea once you’ve setup your disaster recovery solution. Let’s face it once you’ve tested your DR solution, you might not look at it again until your next test, which in some cases is yearly! To setup alarms for SRM in version 5.8 navigate to the vCenter object and click the Manage tab. From there click the Alarm Definitions sub-tab. Click the add (green plus sign) to add a new alarm. ...

This is a Site Recovery Manager 5.8 Guide to help understand the design, installation, operation and architecture of setting up VMware SRM 5.8 SRM 5.8 Architecture SRM 5.8 Installation SRM 5.8 Upgrade from SRM 5.5 SRM 5.8 Site Setup SRM 5.8 Array Based Replication SRM 5.8 Protection Groups SRM 5.8 Recovery Plan SRM 5.8 IP Customization SRM 5.8 Customizing your Recovery Plan SRM 5.8 Test Recovery SRM 5.8 Failover Recovery SRM 5.8 with Automation SRM 5.8 Alarms SRM 5.8 Troubleshooting Official Documentation Links Site Recovery Manager 5.8 Documentation Center Site Recovery Manager 5.8 Compatibility Matrix Site Recovery Manager 5.8 Release Notes Site Recovery Manager 5.8 vCO Plug-in Download Site Recovery Manager 5.8 Download Site Recovery Manager 5.8 Storage Replication Adapters Additional Resources If you want some great resources to continue learning VMware Site Recovery Manager, I suggest checking out these resources: ...

“Your disaster recovery plan is only as good as it’s last test.” “If you haven’t tested your DR plan, then you don’t have a DR plan.” These are all statements I’ve heard in the industry from CIOs and directors, and lucky for us VMware Site Recovery Manager has a test functionality built in for us to leverage without fear of affecting our production workloads. Run a Test Open up one of your recovery plans and click the monitor tab. Here you’ll have several buttons to choose from as well as seeing the list of recovery steps. To run a “Test” recovery click the green arrow button. ...

A terrible thing has happened and it’s time to failover your datacenter to your disaster recovery site. Well, maybe you’re just migrating your datacenter to a new one, but this is always a bit of a tense situation. Luckily we’ve had the opportunity to test the failovers many, many times before so we can be confident in our process. Go to the Recovery Plan and click the monitor tab. Click the “BIG RED BUTTON” (yeah, it’s not that big, but it has big consequences). ...

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. ...