As you are aware that I just published a series of posts for installing and configuring VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM 6.5). I thought of dedicating a page for all the posts and hence the title Step by step guide SRM.
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM 6.5) is a business continuity and disaster recovery solution that helps you to plan, test, and run the recovery of virtual machines between a protected vCenter Server site and a recovery vCenter Server site.
Site Recovery Manager orchestrates the recovery process with the replication mechanisms, to minimize data loss and system downtime.
So, here we go with the list of posts in this series:
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM 6.5) Part 1 - Overview - In this post, I discuss the overall architecture of the VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM 6.5) software and the various components that need to be present in order to have successful Disaster Recovery solution.
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM 6.5) Part 2 - VMware SRM 6.5 Installation - In this post, we discuss the installation procedure of the Site Recovery Manager software along with the requirements and prerequisites. The software will be installed on both sites.
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM 6.5) Part 3 - Pair SRM Sites - This post discusses on how to pair the protected and recovery sites once the software is installed. Once the site pairing is performed, you will be able to see both the sites start under site recovery plug-in in vSphere web client.
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM 6.5) Part 4 - Create Resource Mappings - There are various inventory mappings that need to be performed for a successful DR solution. In this post, we discuss resource mappings and how to configure them.
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM 6.5) Part 5 - Create Folder Mappings - One of the inventory mappings type is Folder mapping. This is performed to have better organization and understanding of the VMs once they have been recovered on the recovery site.
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM 6.5) Part 6 - Create Network Mappings - This is the most important type of inventory mappings. If not configured properly, the VMs would power on the recovery site but not be available on the network.
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM 6.5) Part 7 - Create Placeholder datastore - For every virtual machine in a protection group, Site Recovery Manager creates a placeholder virtual machine at the recovery site. You must identify a datastore on the recovery site in which Site Recovery Manager can store the placeholder virtual machines.
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM 6.5) Part 8 - Install SRA - An Storage Replication Adapter is a program that an array vendor provides that enables Site Recovery Manager to work with a specific kind of array. This has to be installed on both sites and we will be using Unity Block SRA with UnityVSA appliance.
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM 6.5) Part 9 - Configure Replication for EMC UnityVSA - As mentioned before, we will be using EMC UnityVSA appliance as our choice of storage appliance because it supports iSCSI, NFS, vVOL, and Replication.
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM 6.5) Part 10 - Configure SRM Array Manager - After you pair the protected site and recovery site, we configure respective array managers so that Site Recovery Manager can discover replicated devices, compute datastore groups, and initiate storage operations.
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM 6.5) Part 11 - Create Protection Group - A protection group contains VMs whose data has been replicated by either array-based replication (ABR) or vSphere Replication (VR). In our case, we only do ABR.
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM 6.5) Part 12 - Create Recovery Plan - A recovery plan specifies the order in which virtual machines start up on the recovery site. A recovery plan specifies network parameters, such as IP addresses, and can contain user-specified scripts that Site Recovery Manager can run to perform custom recovery actions on virtual machines. In this same post, we test our recovery plan as well.
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM 6.5) Part 13 - Clean up recovery plan - In the last post of series, we perform the cleanup so that the recovery plan is in Ready state and is available again to perform a test or actual Disaster Recovery.
I hope this series helps you understand the workings of VMware Site Recovery Manager and I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!