srm

Install and Configure vSphere Replication with SRM 8.3 on vSphere 7

Duncan Epping · Apr 2, 2020 ·

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.

VMworld Reveals: Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity enhancements! (#HCI2894BU and #HBI3109BU)

Duncan Epping · Sep 4, 2019 ·

At VMworld, various cool new technologies were previewed. In this series of articles, I will write about some of those previewed technologies. Unfortunately, I can’t cover them all as there are simply too many. This article is about enhancements in the business continuity/disaster recovery space. There were 2 sessions where futures were discussed, namely HCI2894BU and HBI3109BU. Please note that this is a brief summary of those sessions, and these are discussing a Technical Preview, these features/products may never be released, and these previews do not represent a commitment of any kind, and this feature (or it’s functionality) is subject to change. Now let’s dive into it, what can you expect for disaster recovery in the future?

The first session I watched was HCI2894BU, this was all about Site Recovery Manager. I think the most interesting part is the future support for Virtual Volumes (vVols) for Site Recovery Manager. It may sound like something simple, but it isn’t. When the version of SRM ships that supports vVols keep in mind that your vVol capable storage system also needs to support it. At day 1 HPe Nimble, HPe 3PAR and Pure Storage will support it and Dell EMC and NetApp are actively working on support. The requirements are that the storage system needs to be vVols 2.0 compliant and support VASA 3.0. Before they dove into the vVols implementation, some history was shared and the current implementation. I found it interesting to know that SRM has over 25.000 customers and has protected more than 3.000.000 workloads over the last decade.

SRM support for VVols coming!

Duncan Epping · Aug 24, 2018 ·

VMworld is coming up, which means that is “announcements season”. First announcement that I can share with you is the fact that VVols support for SRM is now officially on the roadmap. This is something Cormac and I have pushed hard for the past couple of years, and it is great to see this is finally being planned! A post about this was just published on the VMware Virtual Blocks blog and I think the following piece says it all. Read the blog for more info.

Some of our storage partners such as HP Enterprise 3PAR, HP Enterprise Nimble, and Pure Storage have developed and certified to the lastest VVol 2.0 VASA providers specification. VVol 2.0 is part of the vSphere 6.5 release and supports array-based replication with VVol. To support VVol replication operations on these storage arrays, VMware also developed a set of PowerCLI cmdlets so common BC/DR operations such as failover, test failover, and recovery workflows can be scripted as needed. The use of PowerCLI works well for many VVol customers, but we believe many more customers will be able to take advantage of SRM orchestrated BC/DR workflows with VVol.

I can’t wait for this to be made available, and I am sure many VVol customers (and potential customers) will agree with me that this is a highly anticipated feature!

Can I select VSAN as my placeholder datastore with SRM?

Duncan Epping · Jun 13, 2016 ·

I received a question today about SRM, vSphere Replication and VSAN. The current documentation for SRM says the following:

Do not select as placeholder datastores any datastores that you use as the replication target datastore for vSphere Replication.

The question was, what about when using VSAN? As with VSAN as the source and destination datastore I usually only have 1 datastore. What do I select as my placeholder datastore then? Well with VSAN the situation is different. When using VSAN the placeholder datastore selected can be the VSAN datastore where the VMs are also replicated to. This is a gap in our current documentation, and we will make sure to get this updated asap.

VMworld 2015: Site Recovery Manager 6.1 announced

Duncan Epping · Sep 1, 2015 ·

This week Site Recovery Manager 6.1 was announced. There are many enhancements in SRM 6.1 like the integration with NSX for instance and policy driven protection, but personally I feel that support for stretched storage is huge. When I say stretched storage I am referring to solutions like EMC VPLEX, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and IBM San Volume Controller(etc). In the past, and you can still today, when you had these solutions deployed you would have a single vCenter Server with a single cluster and moved VMs around manually when needed, or let HA take care of restarts in failure scenarios.

As of SRM 6.1 running these types of stretched configurations is now also supported. So how does that work, what does it allow you to do, and what does it look like? Well in contrary to a vSphere Metro Storage Cluster solution with SRM 6.1 you will be using two vCenter Server instances. These two vCenter Server instances will have an SRM server attached to it which will use a storage replication adaptor to communicate to the array.

But why would you want this? Why not just stretch the compute cluster also? Many have deployed these stretched configurations for disaster avoidance purposes. The problem is however that there is no form of orchestration whatsoever. This means that all workloads will come up typically in a random fashion. In some cases the application knows how to recover from situations like that, in most cases it does not… Leaving you with a lot of work, as after a failure you will now need to restart services, or VMs, in the right order. This is where SRM comes in, this is the strength of SRM, orchestration.

Besides doing orchestration of a full failover, what SRM can also do in the 6.1 release is evacuate a datacenter using vMotion in an orchestrated / automated way. If there is a disaster about to happen, you can now use the SRM interface to move virtual machines from one datacenter to another, with just a couple of clicks, planned migration is what it is called as can be seen in the screenshot above.

Personally I think this is a great step forward for stretched storage and SRM, very excited about this release!