Okay, so the key thing with any Disaster Recovery solution is to test it to make sure that it works… the unfortunate situation is that most companies will not allow you to go ahead and power down the production systems to confirm that Disaster Recovery will work. This therefore means that we have to come up with solutions to try […]
I came across an interesting situation when performing a Test recovery using VMware SRM, I received the following error: I performed a quick google to try to find a solution to the error message but there wasn’t anything listed, the only suggested solution I could find was to uninstall VMware SRM, reinstall it using a new database… this was not […]
The final stage of our process is to go ahead and perform a failover and failback of some virtual machines. This should be performed using an unimportant virtual machine… please note that during the recovery and failback process, the source virtual machine will be powered off and therefore there will be a network outage to the virtual machine. Once you […]
The next stage is to test our recovery plan. You should always test the recovery plan prior to performing a recovery (unless you are in a situation where testing isn’t possible). The testing will identify any problems that need to be rectified prior to performing a real failover. Under the ‘Recovery Plans’ section of the SRM portal, click the ‘Protection […]
Now we reach the stage of creating a recovery plan. Click ‘Recovery Plans’ in the Site Recovery Manager portal Click ‘Create Recovery Plan’ You are now asked to select the site where the VMs will be recovered, select the desired site, then click ‘Next’ Now you should tick the ‘Protection Groups’ to be included in this recovery plan to select […]
It’s now time to create a protection group, this is the group of virtual machines we want to have protected and replicated to the second location. Click the ‘Protection Groups’ option at the bottom of the screen Click the ‘Create Protection Group’ button at the top of the screen Select the protected site and the array pair created earlier, then […]
This stage is all about configuring the Inventory Mappings. This includes resource mappings, folder mappings, network mappings and placeholder datastores. This is basically linking the resources being used at the protected site with the resources to be used at the recovery site. Resource Mappings Make sure that you are in the ‘Site Recovery Manager’ section of the vSphere client and […]
Although we have gone through and connected together the Site Recovery Manager instances between the local and remote sites, and have installed the SRA software to connect to the XIVs, we haven’t actually connected anything across to the XIV units themselves. This next part configures the connections to the XIV. In the ‘Site Recovery Manager’ section of the vCenter client, […]
The next stage in our process is to connect the two Site Recovery Managers together – this means that your vCenters do not need to be configured in Linked Mode. This process is called pairing. Open up the vSphere client, click the ‘Home’ entry at the top of the application Click on the ‘Site Recovery Manager’ icon to switch to […]
To utilise the XIV storage to perform the replication tasks, we need to install the XIV SRA (Storage Replication Adapter). This is the process to be performed to install the XIV SRA. Please note that you should only download the SRA for your storage directly from VMware, these adapters have been fully tested and approved by VMware… downloading later SRAs […]