Failover back VMs without overwriting production data.

[RmCampos]

Hello Everyone,

I am new with SRM and I am planning to run a DR test with for one especific production environment with 9 virtual servers. After the recovery we will have some application functional validation that will be performed by the application owner and some key users, then we will need to failover the application back to our production datacenter and we are struggling to find a way to failover back without overwriting the production data. Is there any feature on SRM 5.0 that it will failback the servers within the original RPO and discard the chages made in the recovery site? I did some researches and I found that we can only do that through SAN side by taking a snap of the original LUN before start recovery.

Thank you so much!!!

VMworld 2013... see you there!!!

Rafael Campos

[mal_michael]

Hi,

Are you performing SRM Test or Recovery?

Michael.

[RmCampos]

Hi mal_michael,

I am performing recovery and Vmware Support engineer has recommended to take clones of the original VMs before start the recovery. I do like the idea of adding more point of failures to the plan.

Do you know if is it possible to run a Test and then once recovery VMs are up move then from the "bubble" to a vswitch in order to make the recovery VMs available to datacenter network? Of course that in this case I will power off the origianal VMs in the protected side.

Thank you.

RmCampos

[mal_michael · Accepted solution]

In recovery plan settings you can configure a portgroup for test purposes. Simply point it to your production network and SRM will connect the VMs to it instead of a bubble.

Another possible solution could be to use a separate non-routable VLAN for testing purposes at DR site.

VMs will be powered on at DR site, while Production VMs will continue to run), After the validation tests are over, SRM will perform cleanup and you are done.

Thus you utilize the "native" test scenario of SRM and you don't have to worry about your production site's data.

The drawback of this approach is how you provide users an access to test environment (VM Console via vCenter / some networking tricks).

Also, the question is if your application depends on other servers that are not connected to the test VLAN.

Michael.

[RmCampos]

Hello mal_michael.

I did test my recovery plan last Satuday, I have powered off all my production VMs in the protected site and then I moved all the recovered VMs to a valid VLAN. Application was tested and everything went as expected and at the end I have cleaned up everything in my recovery environment and production VMs were powered up again with no issues.

Thank you very much for your time and help on this.

Have a great week.

RmCampos