Technical Track – Vmware Site Recovery Manager

The first session I’ve attended was about the new opportunity offered by Vmware to have a DR orchestrator. Jay Judkowitz, Product Line Manager for DR and Data Protection at Vmware, in what way this add-on facilitate the disaster recovery managers life, automatizing failover in case of disaster and giving the ability to test on a regular basis the DR procedure (with non disruptive testing).

All the process are based on proprietary storage replica command and is orchestrated by Virtual Infrastructure: so we have storage replica and VMware tied together.

Features of SRM are:

• Setup of the workflow (DR plan is stored within Virtual Center, in a virtual runbook)
• Cross sites VC management (VMs get correctly organized on the secondary site, VMs have right CPU and memory allocation after failover, VMs are plugged in the right (v)LAN after failover)
• DR plan change control (rolebased access control, audit trails, recovery and test plans can be exported, changes to DR plan are instantly reflected in the test and failover environments)
• Failover workflow (automate failover with playback of virtual runbook
• Network management (VMs’ IP changes automatically if needed, IP changes could be scripted to reflect the changes into DNS)
• Test workflow (run frequent non -disruptive testing, create a test network, export the results, increase the scope of DR plan, meet the compliance)

In order to use SRM you need to have two sites each with one VCM server. If you have more than two sites you’ll have to work with sites pair.

For now you must use VMFS file system (RDM is experimental). The replication can be done within supported Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage.

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