Possible to have a production VM on SRM host? Looking for clarification.

[sshane]

Hi All,

We're in the process of building out a DR center which will contain a single VSphere host. This host will have 3 or 4 production VMs on it. Is it possible for that same host to serve as our SRM host as well?

We're trying to clarify some conflicting info about combining production VMs on a host that would also be an SRM host. We'd like to keep costs the for our DR site as low as possible and we're hoping we might be able to host a few VMs on the same server as the SRM installation. Thanks.

[admin · Accepted solution]

If by "SRM host" you are referring to the ESX host at your DR site then the simple answer is yes, you can have running VMs on that host. In the case of you initiating a recovery plan you can leave the VMs running or power them down to free up resources. It's important to understand the load that will be placed on the recovery side ESX hosts during failover if you are running production loads plus recovered VMs.

-alex

[sshane]

afontana,

Thanks for the reply. That's what I thought. We had received some info from another source that implied that when a recovery plan was initiated all existing VMs would be destroyed to accommodate the recovered VMs. And, yes, we'd have to ensure there were sufficient resources available for all the recovered VMs to power up alongside the existing production VMs.

[admin]

Yeah, not correct at all. Two things, if necessary you can power off any runnign VMs during the recovery plan (automatically) to ensure resource availability. Also, do your self a favor and create at least two VMFS partitions at the DR site, one for the VMs you plan to run and another in the range of 3-5GB for the "shadow" VMs that SRM will create. This way you have an isolated location for the shadow VMs (which are just place holders for the protected VMs and are only a few KB in size) where users won't be tempted to create real VMs on due to the small size.

-alex

[sshane]

alex,

Great suggestion regarding the VMFS partitions. Thanks again for the clarification.

Scott