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DR Planning
Hello,
We are in the process of planning our vSphere 4 infrastructure and our DR strategy.
We have a DR site that is across the city connected via 10G Fiber. All our VLAN's are trunked to the DR site.
We have LeftHand SAN's setup with one half of each cluster located at the DR site. We are working on putting a witness site online to keep quorum and to keep our LeftHand cluster's online during a disaster at our primary site. If everything works correctly, our LUNs will stay online during a disaster at our primary site. We plan to keep a minimal amount of spare ESX servers availed at the DR site to run our production VM's in the event of a disaster.
We are also looking to run vCenter as a VM.
So assume a disaster occurs and our LUNs stay online. HA will fail since vMotion will be unavailable and all production VM's will go offline. vCenter as a VM will go offline as well along with the primary site ESX servers. At this point we will have all our LUN's, some spare ESX servers and no running VM's at our DR site. I expect that we could go to the DR site, use a laptop to ssh to the local console of one of the ESX server, browse to the LUN that hosts vCenter, register its VMX to one of the DR ESX servers, bring vCenter back online and let HA/DRS kick in and start bringing VM's online.
Question 1) Will we need AD/DNS/WINS to do any of this? Our plan is to have a physical AD/DNS/WINS server at the DR site, but this might be overkill for us.
Question 2) Resignaturing is not an issue for us since the LUNs replicate in realtime via the LeftHand cluster technology. Will we be able to register and start the vCenter VM on a DR ESX server without the licensing component of vCenter running?
Question 3) I know we can use the virtual heartbeat to solve some of these challenges, could we also use FT to keep the vCenter server online at the DR site during a disaster? Or are these both overkill because it is relatively trivial to bring the vCenter VM back online as long as we do not lose our LUNs
We are not overly concerned about the scenario where the LUNs are not available at the DR site. If all our LUNs are not available, vCenter isn't going to help us and we are going to have significantly more challenging issues to worry about.
Any other thoughts or concerns with this plan?
Thank You,
Kevin