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. ...
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 ...
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! ...
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. ...
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.) ...