SRM & VMware View with Persistent Disk

[itsexe]

Hi All,

We want to achieve fail over of our VMware Desktop pool to DR site i.e. "Persistent Linked Clone Desktops with Persistent Disks. As per the below VMware white paper the scenario they have mentioned for Persistent Disks is for a situation when the DR IP Address will get change(Refer to Page-13).

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vmware-view-vcenter-site-recovery-manager-disaster-recover...

However we will keep the same IP addresses at the DR Site therefore we do not require to Provision the new VM's again at the DR site.

Now the quesiton is if we dont want to re-provision VM's at the DR site do we need to Deattach/Attach disk as mentioned on the Page-14 of the above guide?

Regards,

Khurram Shahzad

[vbrowncoat]

Keeping the same IP at the recovery site doesn't mean that you wouldn't need to reprovision. The whole idea of DR is that your View Infrastructure (vCenter, View Management server, connection server, etc) at your primary site is unavailable so you are recovering those machines at your recovery site. This means that even if you keep IPs the same you would still need to re-provision desktops as they existed at your primary site. See page 7 of the whitepaper for a more detailed walkthru of the topology.

Does that make sense?

[itsexe]

Hi Khalsa,

Thanks for your response. let me explain what i wanted to ask:

1- We have View Infrastructure servers( vCenter, View Management server, connection server, etc) these will be failed over using standard SRM steps. Please note that IP address for these view Management servers will remain same.

2- We have Linked Clone Dekstop pool with Persistent Disk. These VDI Desktops will also keep the same range of IP address at DR.

Now there are two questions

Question 1- In the white paper VMware says "The persistent disks must first be detached from their primary site virtual machines so that they can be attached to a virtual machine in the recovery site". But in a Disaster scenario it wont be possible to deattach the disk because our primary site will not be available.

Question 2- Can we follow the failover scenario for Linked Clone Desktops mentioned on Page 12 of the white paper(In this scenario its not re-provisioning the Dekstops) . The only difference is that we have persistent disks whereas they dont have persistent disks attached. So what if we follow the below steps do we still need to re provision the desktop pool.

1. Verify that all VMware View management virtual machines are powered on.

2. Using your storage management utility, break replication for the datastores connected to the View desktop block, and set the datastores to READ/WRITE, if required by storage platform.

3. Mask the datastores to the recovery site, if required by storage platform.

4. Using ESXi command line tools, mount the volumes of the VMware View desktop block on each host in the vSphere cluster: esxcfg-volume –m

5. Using vCenter Server for the VMware View desktop block, rescan the storage, and verify that all volumes are available.

6. Either take the hosts out of maintenance mode for the VMware View desktop block, or add the hosts to your vSphere cluster, depending on the chosen strategy

Regards,

Khurram Shahzad