Simplyfing Disaster Recovery

Ever thought of a DR solution, where you can press the RED button and  DR is initiated seamlessly!

Here's the solution for all VMware ESXi virtual machines named VMware Site Recovery Manager, also known as SRM in short. VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager makes disaster recovery rapid, reliable, manageable, and affordable. SRM is a suite of tools that help to automate and test a disaster recovery plan. SRM works by integrating tightly with storage array-based replication. Most of the major storage vendors have made their products compatible with SRM. Testing the DR plan is one of the major challenges of DR. Typically, it is not performed often enough, and sometimes not at all. SRM allows you to perform a non-disruptive failover test to your remote site and revise and fine-tune your DR plan as necessary. IP addresses of the virtual machines in the remote site can be automatically reconfigured with IP addresses that match the IP scheme of the remote DR site. The failover plan can be executed with a single click that launches user-defined scripts during the recovery process. SRM can automate a series of complex manual steps to simplify the failover process.

The best feature of SRM is that non-disruptive Test DR can be conducted at any point of time!!! where a snap of the LUN’s would be presented to the DR ESXi hosts and the placeholder VM’s would be powered on in a test bubble network which would have no connectivity with the existing VLAN’s. This would help to test the functionality of the DR solution using SRM seamlessly. During real disaster the storage replication would be broken automatically; the replicated LUN’s would be presented to the ESXi hosts at DR site. Once the LUN’s are available the VM’s would be powered on one by one with the actual IP’s and hostname. SRM would also be automated to power-off the some non-prod VM’s at remote site to avoid any capacity constraints at the recovery site.

To get started for the deployment of VMware SRM, you can refer to the VMware documentation at http://www.vmware.com/pdf/srm_admin_4_1.pdf