VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager delivers advanced capabilities for disaster recovery management, testing and failover automation. SRM can manage units of service failover from production to continuity sites, as well as failover between two sites with active workloads. It can also help with planned failovers such as migrations.

First and foremost, VMware Site Recovery Manager is not a replication product. It is an orchestration product that can orchestrate the automation actions for business continuity for each component in a virtual infrastructure. For example, if we wish to run virtual machines from an alternate site, then a number of conditions need to be met:

• VM virtual disk and configuration must exist at secondary site
• Shared storage platform must promote replicated storage to primary storage
• VMs must be found and registered
• VMs must be powered on
• VMs must be connected to appropriate network
• VM may require re-addressing and restarted
• DNS zone changes may be required
• External routing table entries may be required
• VM applications may require re-configuration
• Manual network operator actions may be required during the above automation
• In other words, we must understand the full process, actions and owners for a successful switch from production to continuity. Building a run book of actions is often a paper-based exercise

VMware SRM integrates with existing SAN replication technologies – it does not replicate data itself. The primary storage vendors have developed with VMware plug-ins called Storage Replication Adapters (SRAs). These allow SRM to orchestrate the failover without needing to know the specifics of a storage array – the SRA abstracts that. So for example there is a SRA for EMC Clariion, SRA for HP EVA, SRA for NetApp etc.

Many clients are looking today at moving to shared storage architecture for virtualisation, or are looking to leverage existing SAN investment and obtain replication capability. In all cases, Taupo absolutely ensure that all costs in a replicated storage solution are understood. If there are any license costs for storage replication, then they should be identified up front and part of the solution budget.

SRM allows creation and management of recovery plans directly from the VMware vCenter application. The virtual machines that are protected by storage replication are identified automatically using the storage vendor plug-ins

The virtual infrastructure administrator can monitor availability of sites and alert users of possible site failures. The administrator can store, view and export results of any continuity test and failover execution from VMware vCenter Server as well as control access to recovery plans with granular role-based access controls.

Proving that continuity plans and tests of those plans are compliant with policy is essential. Many organisations face either regulatory compliance or need to demonstrate to clients their business continuity plans. Even without such external influence, it is best practise to regularly test the continuity plans to prove they remain viable and can be enacted without issue.

With VMware Site Recovery Manager, testing of continuity plans is made simple by as SRM leverages your chosen SAN vendors storage snapshot capabilities to perform failover tests without losing replicated data. SRM will connect replicated virtual machines to isolated test networks and automate and customize execution of recovery plans, for example re-addressing guest operating systems for TCP/IP. SRM will also clean up testing environments when testing is complete.

Build your disaster recovery run book in vCenter and start the recovery procedure with a single click. Automate promotion of storage, reconfigure IP’s on virtual machines and run scripts and insert manual processes from within vCenter

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