Planned migration of vCenter and SRM VMs.

[DeMichel93]

Hello, could you help with a case that I have

I wonder if it's possible to protect a vCenter and SRM VMs using SRM?

We have Two vCenter Servers, one on each site, they both have their own PSC however vCenter 2 is connected to PSC of vCenter 1, that means if vCenter 1 will be down, vCenter 2 will still work albeit somewhat limited with just it's own connected hosts. Each Site has it's own SRM Instance installed as a Windows VM (SRM 8.1.2) with VNX + MirrorView SRAs.

Is it possible to do a planned migration of a array-based replication Protection Group which contains vCenter and SRM VMs (vCenter 1 site) to the other site? Is that even doable? Or should I turn off those VMs on Site 1 and do a Disaster Recovery option (or even Forced Recovery)? It's just for test purposes, our clients wants to make sure everything is up and running correctly.

[KocPawel]

Do you consider using vCenter HA instead of SRM?

I've tried to find such information but I am not sure that it is supported configuration (vCenter+SRM).

[DeMichel93]

It's not a thing that we can do.

We hope to use SRM to migrate all the machines + vcenter and srm instances to second site, in case of a disaster happening.

EDIT: What would happen if SRM at Site 1 would turn off, is it possible to migrate machines from Site 1 to Site 2 just with Site 2 SRM instance? Would it be possible to migrate SRM and vCenter virtual machines to Site 2 then?

[KocPawel]

SRM works for Disaster Recovery so you don't need to have available vCenter or SRM on protected site to run Recovery Plan.

[DeMichel93]

Okay, my question is, is it possible to "Recover" a vCenter and SRM virtual machines with the SRM? Unfortunately vMotion is out of question, same goes to the HA.

Is a planned migration possible? We want to test the scenario when the whole site has to go offline but without losing data INCLUDING vCenter and SRM virtual machines.

[DeMichel93]

Okay, I couldn't edit my answer so I add a new comment.

I tested the SRM VM recovery and I got two things, Planned Migration is not possible. I started the migration from the Site 2 SRM instance and Recovery Plan got stuck at Shut Down VM at protected site step.

After that I did a Forced Recovery and that really messed up some stuff, yes, SRM machine got switched to the other DC however it really screwed the MirrorView setup on VNX Storage, hosts that had any of the VMs from the switched datastore got stuck and their management agents just refused to work and communicate with vCenter. The thing that helped with this was a MirrorView Synchronization and switching Secondary to Primary Image.

I'm probably gonna test switching vCenter with both scenarios and write back, It might be useful to somebody since there is literally no information about switching SRM and vCenter using SRM.

[rshenoy]

If you ask me it actually does not serve the purpose of including SRM & vCenter under SRM Protection group.

• You have individual vCenter/SRM for protected site and DR site. So recovering these two VM's would not be much helpful at the DR site.
• SRM completely depends on vCenter at the time of planned migration. So the moment vCenter goes down during planned migration SRM failover is impacted and stalled in between.
• Protected and recovery site SRM DB is always in sync . So whatever failover state has occurred it updates both the databases simultaneous( During Planned Migration)

Hope this helps.

Regards

Ritesh