vCenter Site Recovery Manager: Architecting a DR Solution

vCenter Site Recovery
Manager™
Architecting a DR Solution - Best Practices

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vCenter Site Recovery Manager
Legal

Agenda
•Basic SRM Functions
•Planning
•Designing & Architecting SRM
•Deployment Considerations & Road Blocks
•Maintaining, Migrating & Upgrading
3

How SRM Works
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Basic SRM Functions
• Test
– What does “Non Disruptive” really mean?
• Cleanup
– What happened to my test VMs?
• Recovery
– How does it really work?
– Planned vs Unplanned
– How do I “Fail Back”?
• Reprotect
– Under the hood
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Planning to use SRM
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Planning
• What apps should you protect?
• Where and how should you recover applications?
• Vendor Support
• SRM Operationally
• RPO
– vSphere Replication = as low as 15min
– NetApp = as low as 5min
– EMC CRR = <5min
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Planning
Priority 3
Priority 2
Priority 1
External
website
Web
servers
Application
Servers
Database
Server
Active
Directory

Planning
• Networking
– Guest IP Reconfiguration
– Extend VLANs
• Storage
– EMC RecoverPoint
• Journal Space
–EMC Recommends 20%
• (Datastore Size) X (Percent Rate of Change) X (Days of Test) = Journal Size
• 10TB, 6% RoC, 7-day SRM Test: 10 X .06 X 7 = 4.2 = 4.2TB total Journal space
– NetApp SnapMirror
• 20% SnapReserve
• Plan to Test
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Designing & Architecting SRM
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Architecting
• Documentation is KING!
•Management Cluster
• vCenter Simple vs Custom Install
• vCenter Appliance or not?
• Where to install SRM
• Configure firewalls to allow communication
– Between Protected & Recovery vCenter & SRM servers
– SRA to talk to storage
– Storage replication traffic
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Architecting
12

Architecting
13

Deployment Considerations & Road Blocks
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• Installing SRM on different disk other than C:
may cause an error if spaces in path
– D:Program FilesVMwareSite Recovery Manager
• VMware KB Article 2076347
– NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation
– Doesn’t fix the problem
– Use path without spaces
• D:ProgramFilesVMwareSiteRecoverManager
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• Third party certificates
– CN = “SRM”
–SAN = server.fqdn
–extendedKeyUsage = serverAuth, clientAuth
– Microsoft’s CA may ignore SAN, use an alternate openssl.cnf
• Database Password for SRM
–Some special characters break installer, ! specifically
• SRA requirements
• Permissions
– Only “Administrator” role is propagated
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• Array Pairs require special permissions per vendor
• Protection Groups
–Grouping of datastores (ABR) or VMs (VR)
–Datastore or VM can be a member of only one (1) Protection Group
– Protection Group can be a member of multiple recovery plans
• Recovery Plans
–Can have multiple Recovery Plans for different Tiers or Apps
• VM Boot Priority
– Boot priority of 1-5 at VM level, attribute of VM across ALL Recovery Plans
• VM Boot Dependencies
–ONLY within same boot priority in same Recovery Plan
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• Additional Options
– IP changing is an attribute of a VM
• Can set different IPs for both Protected & Recovery sites
• Only One IP per NIC
• Shutdown or Startup Actions
– Pre-Power On: User Prompt or Script on SRM server
– Post-Power On: User Prompt, Script on SRM server, Script/Command within guest
• Suspend VMs at Recovery site
– Use hardware for Test
• Resume standby hosts
– Use DPM to save power & cooling costs
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Maintaining, Migrating & Upgrading
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Maintaining, Migrating, & Upgrading
• Add Datastores to Protection Groups
–Volume/LUN is member of replication and visible in Array Manager
• Adding VMs to existing Plan
–Configure Protection in Protection Group
• Removing VMs from existing Plan
–Remove Protection in Protection Group
• Removing Datastore from Protection Group
–Remove from replication, refresh Array Manager, delete datastore
•Migrating
– Only install SRM on new server and point to existing database
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Maintaining, Migrating, & Upgrading
• Upgrade path:
– Protected Site vCenter, SRM, SRA, vSphere Replication Appliance & servers
–Recovery Site vCenter, SRM, SRA, vSphere Replication Appliance & servers
–Re-establish SRM & vSphere Replication Connections
–Recovery Site ESXi Hosts
– Protected Site ESXi Hosts
– Upgrade virtual hardware version
– Upgrade VMware Tools
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Q&A
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vCenter Site Recovery Manager: Architecting a DR Solution

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