VMware Site Recovery Manager – Installation Tips and “Gotchas” by @btkrausen
This guest post is by Bryan Krausen who blogs at ITDiversified, where you can find his back catalogue of posts. Find out more about the guest blogger program here.
VMware’s Site Recovery Manager provides the ability to failover VMs in the event of a disaster or for planned migrations between datacenters. In my case, we’re using it for the former as we have two “main” datacenters, one located in Louisville and the other in downtown Chicago. Although we’ve tried to deploy applications with site redundancy in mind, some applications are simply reliant on a single site, whether by limitations of the software or by choice.
Decisions, decisions… Planning a VMware SRM deployment takes considerable thought as there are many choices and routes to accomplish the same tasks. For example, we could choose to utilize EMC’s RecoverPoint or VMware vSphere Replication to replicate the data to the opposite site. We could choose to create a dedicated “DR” VLAN or should we explore spanning Layer 2 across the datacenters using VXLAN or OTV. Should we purchase additional capacity at both sites or simply suspend “Tier 2/3″ VMs in the event of a failure to ensure resources are available?