Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

srm

Cluster sizes and SRM

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A couple of weeks ago I published an article on the maximum amount of VMs one could run on a ESX host. In short; if you enabled HA on your cluster it restricts the amount of VMs you can run on a host depending on the total amount of hosts in the cluster. This means that depending on your consolidation ratio you would need to limit the amount of hosts in a cluster.

Now, there might be another argument to take a good look at your cluster size. Site Recovery Manager. Currently vCenter 2.5 does not allow to simultaneously boot more than 16 VMs.

I’ve always been under the impression that the limit for SRM was 8 simultaneous boots but one of my colleagues notified me that the limit is actually 16. If all you care about is a low RTO, 16 would be a good cluster size wouldn’t it? There’s no point in having more than 16 hosts in a SRM enabled cluster if you don’t need the resources. However, don’t forget to take the HA “limitation” in account when designing your environment for availability.

What port numbers must be open for SRM and VirtualCenter / vCenter Server?

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Every time I do a Site Recovery Manager jumpstart or start a project the same questions pops up. What port numbers must be open for SRM and VirtualCenter / vCenter Server to be able to communicate?

kb.vmware.com/kb/1006738:

The following ports are used for the respective products and must be open for remote communication:

VMware VirtualCenter / vCenter Server:

  • 80 (HTTP)
  • 443 (SSH)
  • 902 (VMware)
  • 8096 (Tomcat)

VMware Site Recovery Manager:

  • 80 (HTTP)
  • 8095 (SOAP Listen)
  • 8096 (HTTP Listen)
  • 9007 (API Listen)
  • 9008 (HTTP Listen)

How to change the SRM change of power state time out values

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One of my customers recently asked if it was possible to change the time-out for a power state change, at the same time this question was asked and answered on an internal mailing list. I thought it would be nice to document it. An example of a power state change task would be the shutdown that is initiated by SRM when you run a recovery plan. The default value is 120 seconds which might not be long enough and could lead to issues when a power off is forced. You can increase or decrease this value by editing the SRM configuration file (vmware-dr.xml). Look for the following section:

<Recovery>
<powerStateChangeTimeout>120</ powerStateChangeTimeout>
</Recovery>

Like stated above, the time-out value is in seconds. The default value is 120 and it can be changed according to your requirements. This change will be effective when the SRM service has been restarted. (If you can’t find this section in the XML file, just add it…)

VI:OPS – Automating Network Setting Changes and DNS Updates on Recovery Site Using SRM

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I just received an email about an excellent article on VI:OPS. The article is titled “Automating Network Setting Changes and DNS Updates on Recovery Site Using VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager“. It includes a PDF file which contains a description for configuring automatic IP-Changes but also includes batch files for DNS updates.

When performing site failover, IT administrators are often faced with challenges to deal with disparate networks on the recovery site:

  • Network properties of virtual machines need to be customized according to the network specification of the recovery site.
  • Domain Name Server (DNS) records pertaining to these virtual machines need to be updated.

VMware® vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) enables customers to design automated recovery plans that incorporate all these necessary network property changes, relieving them of the repetitive and error-prone manual tasks.

This paper shows the mechanisms that SRM customers can use in order to automate these tasks related to network related changes.

SRM: Three updates, EMC / LSI / Hitachi SRA

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Just noticed three SRAs were updated. Might be worth checking out:

  1. EMC Symmetrix Storage Replication Adapter
    Version 2.0.0.21 | Released 04/20/2009
    Fixed : SRDF Adapter for VMWARE Site Recovery Manager (SRM) times out while trying to enumerate LUNs from a local Symmetrix array.
  2. LSI Storage Replication Adapter
    Version 1.00.30.12| Released 04/01/2009
  3. Hitachi Storage Replication Adapter 2
    Version 1.0.8| Released 03/24/2009

I added one of the fixes which is included with the EMC Symmetrix SRA cause I blogged about it a couple of months ago and I’m glad this has been solved.