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hux2000
Contributor
Contributor
‎06-05-2012 11:26 AM

SRM and vMotion at the recovery site?

I have an SRM 5 test environment with two ESXi 5 hosts at the recovery site; storage is handled by a NetApp NFS volume at the protected site replicating to another one at the recovery site. There are eight test VMs being replicated. The two ESXi hosts are configured in a DRS cluster with its automation set to "Manual".

When I ran the "Test" option in SRM, it placed two of the VMs on one ESXi host and the other six on the other host. However, for now I want all the VMs to come up on a single host. So, how can I achieve this? If I try to vMotion any VM at the recovery site to a different host (whether or not the test is running) I get a warning that it's being managed by SRM and that I should do all configuration in SRM. However, I don't see any way in the SRM interface to specify which host a VM will come up on.

Any suggestions?

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4 Replies
GreatWhiteTec
VMware Employee
VMware Employee
‎06-05-2012 11:29 AM

You can set afinity rules under the cluster settings>DRS>Rules. You can tell the Cluster where to power on the VMs.

hux2000
Contributor
Contributor
‎06-08-2012 11:13 AM

Thanks, that works.

A related question: I also have a lot of powered down VMs on that same volume that show up in this cluster. Is there a way that I can vMotion those between the two hosts without powering them on and relying on affinity rules?

The reason why is because the cluster isn't powerful enough to handle having all those VMs powered on, but I might run into a situation where I need to remove a host from the cluster.

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GreatWhiteTec
VMware Employee
VMware Employee
‎06-08-2012 11:18 AM

You could remove the VM(s) from inventory. Then go to the datastore, ricght-click on the vmx file and click add to inventory. From there you can specify the cluster (not host...sorry) you want to assign the VM to.

For the host you can right-click on a VM a select migrate to move it to another host.

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weinstein5
Immortal
Immortal
‎06-08-2012 11:20 AM

Since it sounds like you have DRS and depending on the setting for DRS remember that when you  power on the VM DRS if set to partially automated or fully automated the VM will automatically start on the least loaded host which could be the one you do not want it on - 

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