I have a customer who currently has Physical Machines and is using storage replication for Application Data which is made consistent via Stroage Vendor agents.
The want to move to a VMware environment and to be able to recover the machines remotely.
My initial thought is to keep the Application Data as-is but virtualise the Windows installs then present the Application Data LUNs back as physical moded RDMs. The storage vendor replication can then continue for the Application data. This saves migrating data etc.
I was then thinking I could use Vsphere replication to replicate the Windows c:\ drives over to the DR site.
First question is, Will this work? Vsphere replication states it doesn't support Physical Mode RDMs but I won't be replicating them via this method!
Second question is that some of the VMs have a large memory footprint, does Vsphere replication create a disk the same size as memory on replication cycles like snapshots do?
If I went for SRM would all the replication have to be via the same method? i.e. Storage Level or vSphere replication?
