Recovery test using SRM 5.1

[asrarguna]

Hello All,

I have set up SRM using storage replication and both my sites are connected. Now I am ready to do my first recovery test. I have a question. I am sorry if the question is stupid as this is the first time i am doing this.

If i check the recovery steps under recovery plan in srm plugin in vcenter, i can see my protected vms power on priority. If i configure the vm and goto IP settings, I can set the IP address of this VM at protected site as well as recovery site.

Q1) If I do not check customize IP during recovery option, then will the machine automatically get the new IP at the recovery site using dhcp? If yes, the will it get the ip from the correct subnet which it is a part of in vcenter (vlan)?

Q2) If I set the recover ip manually then after the failover when VM is started at the recovery site, what happens to the old DNS entry? The vm will try to make a new dns entry with same hostname but different ip while as the old entry still exists.

Thanks - AG

[Bucketenator]

Q1 - If the VM's vNIC is configured to use a static IP at the protected site, it will use the same IP at the recovery site. If its configured to use DHCP, it will use DHCP at the recovery site (if DHCP is active in the L2 network segment to which it's mapped).

Q2 - If the recovered VM's vNIC is configured to use Dynamic DNS (DDNS) then the DNS entry should be updated automagically. Otherwise you may need to invoke the dns_updates.pl utility to do the DNS updates; however, officially this is unsupported .... hmmm.    Others may have some other approaches to this issue?

JD

[asrarguna]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. I did the failover and I eneterd the recovery site dns server address while configuring the vm. After failover the current dns entry for this vm got removed automatically but there was no new dns entry for this vm. So i had to register the vm with the dns and it worked.

Now when I try to failback to the original site, it gives errors:

2. Configure Protection to Reverse Direction:

Error - The operation was only partially completed for the protection group 'Protected_VMs' since a protected VM belonging to it was not successful in completing the operation. Cannot protect virtual machine 'srmvm1' because its config file '[SRM_Protected] srmvm1/srmvm1.vmx' is located on a non-replicated or non-protected datastore. Cannot protect virtual machine 'srmvm2' because its config file '[SRM_Protected] srmvm2/srmvm2.vmx' is located on a non-replicated or non-protected datastore.

Error - The operation was only partially completed for the protection group 'KPC_Protected_VMs' since a protected VM belonging to it was not successful in completing the operation.

Any idea about the error?

[Bucketenator]

Sounds like you havent done a 'reprotect'?  That reverses the replication direction back to the original protected site.

See Reprotect Virtual Machines

JD

[asrarguna]

Hi,

I checked the Known Issues in SRM 5.1 (VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.1 Release Notes) and it says that This error occurs during the second re-protect run if the first run failed with Operation Timed out error during "Configure storage to reverse direction" step. But I am getting this during first re-protect run.

At another place in the same document, vmware mentions that "Workaround: Run the reprotect operation again." I did and same error again..

Is there any permanent fix for this?

Thanks AG