I was playing with Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.0.1 today and I wanted to trigger a fail-over. As I just wanted a quick test I figured I would use the “forced recovery” option. This option allows you to fail-over without SRM trying to sync the storage layer. In a normal situation I would probably try to sync my storage but as I knew the other site was dead and I just wanted to test it quickly I figured I would just tick it and get the recovery plan going. Unfortunately the option was grayed out.
You can enable this fairly simple though:
- Right click in the left pane on your site
- Click “advanced settings”
- Click “Recovery”
- Select the “recovery.forcedFailover” setting
Now when you run your recovery plan it will not try to power-off/shutdown VMs or sync the storage. Nice right.
Another option that I spotted which many of you might need is “storageProvider.hostRescanRepeatCnt”, in the past I often had to rescan my storage system at least twice before LUNs would appear. That is where this setting comes in handy as it will do that for you. There’s some more nice new SRM 5.0.1 features to be found in this article by Ken Werneburg, make sure to read it.
I wasn’t sure if you are aware but storageProvider.hostRescanRepeatCnt existed in SRM versions 4.1 and earlier. This was a useful feature for some environments. When the feature disappeared in newer versions of SRM, it created support issues from those who depdended on it. I wrote a short piece about this in March at http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2012/03/16/vsphere-5-0-update-1-and-related-product-launches/
Forced Recovery is also a new feature in SRM 5.0.1.
Thanks Duncan – this quickly saved my bacon.