Introduction
Site Recovery Manager is a site migration and disaster recovery solution from VMware. As an extension to VMware vCenter server, VMware Site recovery delivers a business continuity and disaster recovery solution that provides disaster recovery, site migration and non-disruptive testing capabilities in your environment. In conjunction with various replication solutions including VMware vSphere Replication™ Site Recovery Manager automate the process of migrating and recovering virtual machine workloads in recovery site.
Site Recovery Manager 6.5 is deployed in a paired configuration, for example, protected site and recovery site. The Site Recovery Manager 6.5 software is installed on a Microsoft Windows server at both sites.
Site Recovery Manager Recovery plan controls the migration of protected inventory and services from one site to the other. A recovery plan is like an automated run book. It specifies the order in which virtual machines are shut down and started up, the resource pools to which they are allocated and the network they can access. Multiple recovery plans can be configured to migrate individual applications and entire sites providing finer control over what virtual machines are failed over and failed back. Recovery plans are flexible and customizable.
VMware Site Recovery Manager is tightly integrated with VMware Web Client. All the VMware SRM administrative activities can be performed using VMware Web Client.
vCenter Site Recovery Manager features
Site Recovery Manager automates every aspect of executing a disaster recovery plan to accelerate recovery and eliminate the risks involved with manual processes.
- Site Recovery Manager gives flexibility to perform automated failover testing as needed to avoid impact to production applications and ensure regulatory compliance through detailed reports. You can create and manage recovery plans for thousands of virtual machines directly from the vSphere Web Client.
- You can perform a DR Failover or a planned migration, and failback recovered virtual machines to the original site.
- Site Recovery Manager integrates with VMware NSX. It is no longer necessary to re-configure IP addresses on recovered virtual machines. Security policies are also preserved, further reducing configurations post-recovery.
- You can build custom automation workflows using vRealize Orchestrator plug-in for Site Recovery Manager.
- Site Recovery Manager can enable live migration of applications at scale between two sites when using a certified stretched solution.
- VMware Site Recovery Manager provide Stretched storage
- Site Recovery Manager integrates with a broad range of replication solutions i.e. vSphere Replication and Array-based replication solutions so you can set your recovery point objective (RPO) according to your needs.
Use Cases
Though the primary use case of VMware Site Recovery Manager is to perform disaster recovery from one site to another site. It can handle a number of other use cases like Planned Migration, Upgrade and patching testing and provide significant capability and flexibility to customers.
Disaster Recovery: Disaster recovery or an unplanned failover is what Site Recovery Manager was specifically designed to accomplish. Site Recovery Manager can help in this situation by automating and orchestrating the recovery of critical business systems for partial or full site failures ensuring the fastest RTO.
Disaster Avoidance: Preventive failover is another use case for Site Recovery Manager. When utilized with a supported stretched storage solution, Site Recovery Manager can orchestrate the cross-vCenter vMotion of virtual machines allowing for zero-downtime disaster avoidance. Without stretched storage, Site Recovery Manager allows for the graceful shutdown of virtual machines at the protected site, full replication of data, and ordered startup of virtual machines and applications at the recovery site ensuring app-consistency and zero data loss.
Planned Migration: Site Recovery Manager can be used for movement of virtual machines and applications between sites. This can be for datacenter relocation, global load balancing or planned site maintenance.
Upgrade and patch testing: The Site Recovery Manager test environment provides a perfect location for conducting operating system and application upgrade and patch testing. Test environments are complete copies of production environments configured in an isolated network segment which ensures that testing is as realistic as possible while at the same time not impacting production workloads or replication.
In this entire series of posts, we will be discussing about the step by step procedures on how to configure VMware SRM 6.5 using different replication solutions. I hope this is informative for you. Thanks for reading. Be social and share it in Social media, If you feel worth sharing it.