Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

site recovery manager

VMworld #NotSupported lightning talk slides – Hacking SRM

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I presented this 15 minute talk at VMworld about hacking SRM or actually hacking the Storage Replication Adapter which is part of SRM. I noticed William Lam shared his slides so I figured I would do the same. This slidedeck was based on two articles I did a while back around hacking the SRA, you might want to read them as well. ( 1 , 2 )

I hope they are useful. Once again, thanks to Randy Keener for coming up with this excellent idea and thanks to the brownbag guys for helping hosting this great initiative. Lets hope we will see more of this next year at VMworld,

Demo time – vCloud Director 5.1 disaster recovery demo

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When I was playing with the new vCloud Director 5.1 and Site Recovery Manager 5.1 I figured I would record a demo of the DR solution that Chris Colotti and I developed. The demo is fairly straight forward and hopefully helps you in the process of building a resilient cloud infrastructure. In this demo I have included:

  • vSphere 5.1
    • vSphere Replication
  • vCloud Director 5.1
  • Site Recovery Manager 5.1

Site Recovery Manager survey… please help us out!

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I just received an email from the the Site Recovery Manager Product Management team. They created a new survey, and I was hoping each of you who is using, or will be purchasing SRM soon, could take the time to complete it. These types of surveys are very useful for Product Management when it comes to setting priorities for new features and identify gaps etc. Thanks!

We are conducting a survey about VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to learn more about how people use our products. The survey will help us identify where we can improve the product to meet your needs and we would really appreciate getting your feedback.

The link to the survey is below, it typically takes less than 10 minutes to complete. http://www.surveymethods.com/EndUser.aspx?ECC8A4BDEDA6B9BAE7

Thanks!

Forced recovery option grayed out with Site Recovery Manager 5.0.1

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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:

  1. Right click in the left pane on your site
  2. Click “advanced settings”
  3. Click “Recovery”
  4. 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.

Stretched Clusters and Site Recovery Manager

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My colleague Ken Werneburg, also known as “@vmKen“, just published a new white paper. (Follow him if you aren’t yet!) This white paper talks about both SRM and Stretched Cluster solutions and explains the advantages and disadvantages of either. It provides a great overview in my opinion on when a stretched cluster should be implemented or when SRM makes more sense. Various goals and concepts are discussed and I think this is a must read for everyone exploring implementing a Stretched Clusters or SRM.

http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10262

This paper is intended to clarify concepts involved with choosing solutions for vSphere site availability, and to help understand the use cases for availability solutions for the virtualized infrastructure. Specific guidance is given around the intended use of DR solutions like VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager and contrasted with the intended use of geographically stretched clusters spanning multiple datacenters. While both solutions excel at their primary use case, their strengths lie in different areas which are explored within.