Avoid moving VM's for datastores holding SRM and non-SRM virtual machines

[Marcel1967]

Our customer has datastores which have both virtual machines which need to be protected by SRM and vm's which do not require SRM protection.

Is there a way to protect those VM's without the need to storage migrate the non-SRM VM's to other datastores?

When performing a test failover this is the error I get

Error - Virtual machines "<VM names>" that are not protected by this protection group use datastores "<datastore>" that are in this protection group.

I expect this is by design but maybe there is a workaroud. Performing many storage migations and placing high IO/ high priority VM's on a limited number of datastores is not what I am looking forward too.

[vbrowncoat]

They could use vSphere Replication, that would allow them to replicate on a VM level instead of a LUN/Datastore level.

If they are using array-based replication though there is no way to have VMs that are protected and unprotected on the same datastore.

Do they understand the problems it will cause them if they did a failover? If you are concerned about IO you could always create additional datastores?

[Marcel1967]

Thanks for your reply. Is there a technical reason why protected and unprotected VM's cannot reside on the same datastore?

Or a licensing one? Attaching LUNs to ESXi hosts by SRM having unprotected VM's on them which can then manually registered and started?

[vbrowncoat]

Technical, think about what happens to the unprotected VMs when you failover that LUN. Also, there will likely be problems unmounting that LUN from hosts (which could lead to problems reprotecting and failing back).