DC16 vCenter Site Recovery Manager – Implementation Common Pitfalls and best practises

Diaster Recovery is becoming a hot topic nowadays because virtualization makes it much more easy to recover from a disaster. Over 500 attendeed are present in the room for this presentation on Site Recovery Manager presented by Lee Dilworth of VMware.

A basis overview of the product is given. Two datacenters need a vCenter Server in each and two SRM instanced. Replication of data and virtual machines is done by the SAN. SRM is not able to do a fully automated failback yet. But is can be done much quicker than a manual failback.

The next release of SRM, released in 2009, will have support for NFS. During a test failover replication of data will continue. A good thing as you do not want to stop replication during a test. You lose your data in case of a emergency during testing and next your job.

Most of the presentation is old news for people already familiar with the product. Best practises presented can be found on the vmware.com website. Advise is to always read the documentention supplied by the supplier of the Site Recovery Adapter. The SRA  is a piece of software made by the SAN supplier which integrates SRM and the SAN software. The SRA can be dowloaded off the VMware.com website.