Part 17 – Running a Recovery

Finally, we have arrived to a point where we can run the Recovery. SRM migrates all the VMs in the recovery plan to the recovery site. SRM attempts to shutdown the VMs at the Protected Site. Not everyone in the organization are allowed to run recovery as it alters the entire environment in many cases and reversing things is time consuming and needs effort.

#run-recovery, #srm-6-1

Part 15 – Test a Recovery Plan

Now that we have the recovery plan configured according to our needs, its time we test the recovery plan. When you test a recovery plan, SRM uses the test network to test the VMs in the plan and also no VMs on the Protected Site are powered off unlike when the actual recovery plan is run. Remember that, if a recovery plan requires to suspend or power off any VM on the recovery site, testing the recovery plan also suspends the VMs and no other changes are made to the production environment during the test recovery.

#srm-6-1, #test-recovery-plan, #timeout, #vmware-tools-heartbeat

Part 14 – Configuring a Recovery Plan

Creating a Recovery Plan is a very good thing but how do make it work the way we want it to? Well, every Recovery Plan has to be configured for the fact that, virtual machines depend on other machines in many ways, for example, the DB server has to powered on first for the app server and web server to connect to it and in some cases, we want to run some start-up scripts so that the machine can become available to users. All such things have to be fed to the recovery plan. So let’s see how that is done.

#ip-costomization, #recovery-plan, #recovery-steps, #srm-6-1

Part 13 – Creating a Recovery Plan

We have come a long way in settings up things and working on SRM related stuff. We have almost reached the last steps in enabling a Disaster Recovery Solution for VMs. Now that we have Protection Groups created and verified all the required VMs are being replicated as expected, our next step would be to create a Recovery Plan so that the Protection Groups can be made use of. A Recovery Plan controls every step of the recovery process, including the order in which the VMs have to be powered on, networks to be used, and other stuff related to virtual machines to be protected.

#recovery-plan, #srm-6-1

Part 12 – Creating Protection Group

As discussed in our previous post, Protection Groups are a collection of virtual machines that are protected together. Protection Groups can be created based on the type of replication they have ie whether it is Array Based or vSphere Replication or Storage Policy Based. A Recovery Plan can include Protection Groups from Array Based Replication or vSphere Based Replication but a Storage Policy Based Protection Group cannot be included in the same Recovery Plan as Array or vSphere Replication Protection Group.

#placeholder-virtual-machines, #protection-groups, #srm-6-1

Part 9 – Configure and Rescan SRM Array Managers

Let’s get moving with the SRM stuff. The very first thing that needs to be done after pairing the sites and installing SRAs is to configure SRM Array Managers which helps the SRM to discover the replicated devices, compute datastore groups and initiate storage operations. This is a one time operation unless there is a change in the credentials.

#array-manager, #pair-array-manager, #replication-direction, #srm-6-1

Part 1 – Introduction to SRM 6.1

Hey there! With new versions coming up, it’s always a good practice to test the new features and get some hands on with them. I wanted to get some more insight into the VMware SRM and so i thought it would be a good thing to also blog my experience with lab. I am going to build a home lab for this and probably i may dedicate a separate blog post for the lab alone. So let’s get started with the SRM series.

#deployment-models, #protection-groups, #recovery-plan, #srm-6-1