Srm

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. ...

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. ...

I was recently tasked with performing a company wide disaster recovery test. The test had the normal goals with a standard recovery time objective, and recover point objectives. Unfortunately, the test needed to be performed during the middle of a production day, and not affect production. Under normal circumstances we could assume that our production servers were disabled or destroyed in some manner and we could power up our DR servers and continue the business. During this test however we needed to make sure that both networks could run at the same time. ...