I haven’t really done much with vSphere Replication and Site Recovery Manager (SRM) in the past years as my main focus has been vSAN. I figured I would get two clusters up and running and install and configure both vSphere Replication as well as SRM on top of vSphere 7. Although the installation and configuration are pretty straight forward, there are a few steps which are important. Below the steps I took to get things up and running.
- Deploy the vSphere Replication appliance in both clusters
- Deploy the Site Recovery Manager appliance in both clusters
- Go to “https://<ip of vSphere Replication appliance>:5480” in first cluster
- username: root
- password: what ever you specified!
- Click on “Configuration Page” link
- Specify Password of vCenter Server in the Password field
- Click “Apply Network Settings”
- Click “Save and Restart Service”
- Accept the SSL Certificate
- Repeat the above for the second cluster!
- Now go to your vSphere H5 Client and wait until the vSphere Replicated tasks are completed
- Log out of the vSphere H5 Client and log back in for both clusters
- Now go to the first cluster / vCenter server
- Now click on “Menu” and then “Site Recovery”
- Click “open Site Recovery”
- Click “New Site Pair”
- Fill out the details of the second vCenter Server
- Click Next and Connect if you get a security alert and are certain this is the correct vCenter instance
- Select the correct listed vCenter instance and vSphere Replication appliance
- Click Next and Finish, now you will see a task within vCenter that states “Connect vSphere Replication Sites”
- Now you have vSphere Replication running and you can replicate VMs from one location to the other manually if and when desired.
Okay, now let’s continue with Site Recovery Manager aka SRM.
- Go to “https://<ip of SRM appliance>:5480” in your first cluster
- username: admin
- password: what ever you specified!
- Click on “Configure Appliance”
- Fill out the details of the first vCenter Server instance which needs to be associated with this SRM instance
- Click Next and Connect
- Select the vCenter Server instance and click Next and Connect
- Give the Site a name, I am going to call it “Site A”
- Fill in the administrator email address and click Next and Finish
- Now the appliance will be configured
- Repeat the above in the second location, which I will name “Site B”
- Wait until the configuration is completed
- That concludes the first step of the SRM Configuration,
I logged out of vSphere Client and logged back in. Next, I took the following steps:
- Click Menu and Site Recovery
- Click “Open Site Recovery”, now a new tab opens up with the Site Recovery interface
- Click “New Site Pair”
- Enter the details of the second site
- Select the vCenter Server instance, and then in the pane below you have the option to select the SRM instance
- Click Next, click Connect and Finish
Now we have established a relationship between the two SRM instances next up would be the “Mappings”, you need to complete those before you can continue with the protection of your VMs. The first one would be Network Mappings, then Folder, Resource and Storage Mappings. The concept is pretty straight forward, and basically it determines which network a VM would get connected to or in which folder or resource pool it will land etc. Next, you will need to specify the placeholder datastore, which is basically where the configuration files of the replicated VMs will be stored. This is in my case the vSAN Datastore in both locations, note you have to configure it for both locations if you want to replicate both ways!
Now you can create your Protection Group(s) and a Recovery Plan(s). I am not going to describe it in the post, I may do that at a later stage. I feel that SRM and vSphere Replication haven’t been getting the proper attention the past couple of years, hence I decided to create some content around it. Make sure to also watch this demo around vSphere Replication UI enhancements.
Cantique says
In a VCF configuration where we have a management vCenter and workload vCenters, can I deploy the appliance in management vCenter but use it to serve the workload vCenter?