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Jer2224
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Licensing vCenter with SRM

Hi all,

I seem to be running in circles with this question - I've read the documentation and logged a call with Customer Services about it, and the answers are contradictory to say the least.....

We are looking to implement an SRM solution within a new infrastructure - essentially a management cluster will be using SRM to failover management VMs from a protected DC to a recovery DC in another city.  The recovery DC will be dark for normal operations, only becoming live when SRM failover occurs, and will not be hosting any VMs.

The question I have relates to vCenter licensing of SRM. The documentation states that when failing over a vCenter server from a protected site to a recovery site that hosts no other VMs, only 1 vCenter license is required. However the licensing team at VMware stated that 2 licenses are required, in order to failback the VMs to the original protected site once it has been recovered.

So, which is it? Any thoughts anyone (who isn't a reseller or someone trying to to sell me licenses)? Happy to qualify points if needed to answer the question......

Cheers.

Jeremy.

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idle-jam
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the vcenter in the DR has to be powered up and linked with the SRM server in DR, in this scenario it is actually power up and hence 2nd license is required.

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idle-jam
Immortal
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the vcenter in the DR has to be powered up and linked with the SRM server in DR, in this scenario it is actually power up and hence 2nd license is required.

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Jer2224
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Many thanks for this, so it's the documentation that's ambiguous!

One other question - how can the vCenter server be part of a protection group, or has this and the SRM server to be outside the protected management group, and if this is the case - how to protect SRM and vCenter servers?

I've looked, but cannot find any good logical or topographic examples of SRM design architecture with VM placement etc......

Many thanks.

Jeremy.

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idle-jam
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we did not protect over vcenter due to that in the event of DR, the vcenter in DR will take over and we manage our VM from there. even if you have manage to failover the vcenter to DR, you will need to manually add to DR host to it (which is pretty useless). have a loko at this design. http://www.no-x.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/srm-general11.png

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