Running SRM in a active/active setup

[piedthepiper]

Hi Guys,

I am curious about using SRM to protect VMs in 2 data centres that are both active.

Data centre A has a bunch of VMs that need to be replicated over to Data Centre B using array replication

But Data Centre B has  bunch of different VMs that need to replicated over to Data Centre A.

Both data centres have enough spare capacity to cope with a total failure at one site. I was wondering how would this work with SRM as normally you have just one source site and one target site?

Can you essentially have one recovery plan configured at Site A going to Site B and another recovery plan from configure at Site B going to Site A with async replication.

What are the licensing implications and is there any documentation or links to such a setup?

Cheers

Bilal

[basher · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Active-active scenarios are perfectly supported since SRM 5.0 (you need SRM 5.1 if you are using vSphere Replication). You can have PG A protecting VMs on Site A and PG B protecting VMs on Site B. Then you create two corresponding recovery plans.

From licensing perspective there are some tricks - because of active active, you now need licenses for all VMs at every site - i.e. you need to have a license allocated on Site B for all VMs that might be brought from Site A (and vice versa). This can be avoided by using Linked Mode between Site A and Site B vCenter servers.

Long story short - SRM supports your scenario. There isn't specific documentation for this use case as it is the primary one for SRM these days . You can look at this page on SRM docs: Site Recovery Manager 6.0 Documentation Center

Thanks

Stefan

[vbrowncoat]

(I didn't type as fast as Stefan - +1 to his comments) Bi-directional protection is fully supported by SRM. Whether you are using array-based replication or VR it would work the same bi-directional as with protected-recovery site config, you would configure replication to protect the VMs from each site to the other. You would setup protection groups and recovery plans accordingly (so from A to B and from B to A). For licensing, SRM is licensed per protected VM so if you were protecting 50 VMs at site A and 50 at site B you'd need 100 licenses.

There isn't any specific documentation as there really isn't anything specific to this process that is different from normal SRM configuration.