ESXi 5 Disaster Recovery Design

[leeb_russell]

Hi all,

Was hoping someon might be able to point me in the right direction. We are currently running vSphere 5 Essentials Plus with 2 ESXi Hosts in our production environment. The 2 hosts are connected to an Equallogic PS4100XV. We have another PS4100XV in our DR site and are planning to replicate the SAN volumes from production to DR over a 100Mbps fibre link. We will be installing our final host in the DR site.

Ideally, in a DR scenario, I would like the host in DR to point to the local Equallogic SAN in DR. However I'm not sure whether the host should be in the same cluster as production or separate. Essentials plus only allows 3 hosts so we can't have a second cluster.

Also, if we vMotion servers to DR, they would still be running from the production datastore unless we change the datastore as well of course, but then not sure how that would impact the Equallogic replication.

I'm thinking we could simply browse to the datastore on the Equallogic in DR and add the servers to the inventory, but not sure how this would impact vCenter. We have vCenter server running as a virtual machine.

I'm sure there are some best practices for this scenario and would be keen to hear if anyone has any ideas on how to approach this ? We are fairly small environment and have just 15 servers.

Thanks!

[vmroyale]

Hello and welcome to the communities.

Note: Discussion successfully moved from VMware ESXi 5 to Enterprise Strategy & Planning

We  are currently running vSphere 5 Essentials Plus with 2 ESXi Hosts in our  production environment. The 2 hosts are connected to an Equallogic  PS4100XV. We have another PS4100XV in our DR site and are planning to  replicate the SAN volumes from production to DR over a 100Mbps fibre  link. We will be installing our final host in the DR site.

This sounds good so far.

Ideally, in a DR scenario, I would like the host in DR to point to the  local Equallogic SAN in DR. However I'm not sure whether the host should  be in the same cluster as production or separate. Essentials plus only  allows 3 hosts so we can't have a second cluster.

I would probably create a separate datacenter with the single host at the DR site in it. This will allow everything to be managed by the single vCenter Server instance.

Also, if we vMotion servers to DR, they would still be running from the  production datastore unless we change the datastore as well of course,  but then not sure how that would impact the Equallogic replication.

You won't be doing vMotion with a 100Mbps link and two separate EQs. You could cold migrate VMs from one site to the other and the VM would move from one EQ (and ESXi host) to the other.

I'm thinking we could simply browse to the datastore on the Equallogic  in DR and add the servers to the inventory, but not sure how this would  impact vCenter. We have vCenter server running as a virtual machine.

The replicated EQ volumes will be available on the EQ at the DR site. You would have to promote or clone these replicas to actual volumes that could then be presented to your ESXi host at the DR site. There will be manual intervention for this part of the process. So say you lose your primary site - you simply get to the DR site, bring the EQ volumes online (clone or promote), add the volumes to your ESXi host, then browse the datastore to add the VMs to inventory and power them up.

[leeb_russell]

Hi Bryan,

Thanks very much for the quick response, it's been very helpful. After re-reading the network requirements for vMotion, it's clear that a 100Mbps link won't work as you stated

I think a cold migration is the easiest option. One last question, If we were to cold migrate VMs to the DR site ESXi host only, could we in theory promote the volumes in the EQ DR site and then power on the VMs ?

Thanks!

[vmroyale · Accepted solution]

If we were to cold migrate VMs to the DR site ESXi  host only, could we in theory promote the volumes in the EQ DR site and  then power on the VMs ?

If you cold migrated VMs to the ESXi host at the DR site, they would have to be located on VMFS datastores that the ESXi host already has access to. You would only need to promote replica sets that the EQ created, if you wanted access to the replicated version.

[leeb_russell]

Thanks, makes sense.