How to recover VM to a specific ESX host in the Cluster?

[SudhirH]

I have two sites, Primary and DR. I have a cluster on the primary site which consists of 2 ESX hosts. An 2-node application cluster is created consisting of VM from each of these ESX hosts. The VM are non-migrateable. The datastore for each of the ESX is local and same on the DR setup. I have replication setup of the VM cluster to a DR cluster using vSphere replication. I have created a protection group and recovery plan. When I create the protection group and add the VM it selects one of the ESX host on the DR site as the recovery host, whereas I require that the VM's need to be specifically recovered on a certain ESX host on the DR setup.

Currently I need to migrate the placeholder VM's that get created on the DR site to their respective ESX host before I invoke the DR plan. Otherwise when the recovery plan is execute it wont have access to the the vmx file. Is there a better way of doing this?

TIA,

Sudhir

[cjscol]

This is the only way I have found to do it, i.e. manually migrating the placeholder VMs to the hosts I want them on once SRM has created the placeholder VMs.

[SudhirH]

Do you do the same before attempting a re-protect after the recovery plan is successful?

[cjscol]

AFTER you have done a reprotect you will need to check the hosts the new placeholder VMs are on at the original Protected Site and move them if they are not where you want them.

Are you using DRS in your environment?

[SudhirH]

No. But this workaround is painful and error prone.