SRM 5.8 requires me to burn datastore storage at BOTH sites for placeholders?

[maleitch]

Honestly, I am having a nightmare of a time finding documentation on how all the SRM 5.8 pieces relate to each other.  I am attempting to use VSphere replication vs. array based and I have the replication servers deployed at both sites and "paired" but nothing more.

So I am at the point where I have to "Configure Placeholder Datastore" which states:

You must specify a placeholder datastore for Site Recovery Manager to use to store placeholder virtual machines on the recovery site.

You must configure a placeholder datastore on both sites in the pair to establish bidirectional protection and reprotect.

Well I don't see where I could specify if I am doing bidirectional or reprotect, however, when I go to configure Placeholder Datastore it only lists the datastores that are connected to my SOURCE site.  If am only concerned with one-way failover to my protect site then how do I specify the datastores over in my protect site?

[basher]

Similar to 5.5 and before, you'll need to select your protection and then recovery sites by clicking sites icons in the left navigational panel. This way you can configure placeholder datastores per site.

Best regards

Stefan Tsonev

[maleitch]

Sorry, but this is my first experience with SRM.

From the sites section all I can do is pair sites or reconfigure pairing, and when pairing the only option is to specify the failover vcenter.  So I am not sure when you say "select your protection" where this is actually configured.

Thanks,

[Daniel_Georgiev · Accepted solution]

You can specify Inventory Mappings and Placeholder Datastores for both sites, but you have to select the desired site first.

Hope this help,

Daniel G.

[maleitch]

I am not so sure how helpful this new SRM 5.8 is arranged.  You click on one of the site's and it gives you a checklist of steps to set it up.  However, it appears that those steps have no intelligence as to where you initiated the setup from.  I was expecting the software to know that I started the configuration at the "Source" site but that appears not to be the case.

Now on to my next problem but will open a new thread for this.  Thanks for the help.

[basher]

In SRM 5.x there is no "source" or "destination" site. SRM works in bidirectional mode where both sites can be source AND destination (aka active-active).

Setting up placeholder datatastores on both sites would help you later when you failover and want to "reprotect" or fail back.

Also, placeholder VMs consume very little space (~1kb per VM). Also SRM does not require exclusive access to placeholder datastores.

Best regards

[maleitch]

Interesting.

Are you saying that I can specify my normal day-to-day production datastores as an SRM placeholder datastore with no negative impact on my production vm's?

[basher]

According to the SRM Admin Guide here: VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.8 Documentation Center

Placeholder datastores must meet certain criteria.

■	For clusters, the placeholder datastores must be visible to all of the hosts in the cluster.
■	You cannot select replicated datastores as placeholder datastores.

Because placeholder VMs cannot be powered on, they will not impact the performance of Production VMs running on the same datastore.

You may still want to consider if:

* there are VMs with the same name on both sites. SRM will handle this case but it might cause confusion with datastore folders like "duplicate VM name (1)", etc.

* there are multiple admins managing these datastores - someone might be confused by seeing these VMs with no disks (.VMDK files) and might accidentally delete them.

Best regards

Stefan