SRM protected vm restarts - sequential or parallel?

[John_Balsillie]

In the VMware Site Recovery Manager traing course Lab Manual, it states:

"Virtual machines with a high priority will be started sequentially. Virtual machines with a normal or low priority will be started in parallel."

Is this correct? I have only ever seen sequential restarts, regardles of priority.

If parallel restarts are possible, how/where is this configured?

[Jay_Judkowitz · Accepted solution]

How many hosts are in the cluster at the recovery site? We start 1 VM per host in the normal and low priority groups. If you have only 1 host, it will effectively be sequential.

Other than using the normal and low priority groups, there is nothing you need to get parallel startup.

[mullo]

Hi John,

This is correct.

I created a test recovery plan with two machines in the high priority group and two normal priority group. The two high priority started sequentially, and the two normal priority parallel.

Although running a bigger test, with more normal priority machines showed that only two will start parallel at a time. This may be due to the number of physcial hosts (only two on the recovery end), I'm not sure on that. The only configuration i did was to put the machines under the "Recover High Priority Virtual Machines" and "Recover Normal Priority Virtual Machines" in the recovery plan steps.

Hope this helps.

[John_Balsillie]

Thank you. I had only been using a single recovery ESX host so this explains the sequential restarts for low and normal priority vms.

There is a brief mention of parallelism in both the Release notes and in the Admin Guide (very brief mention).

[depping]

Correct John. it will start parallel when you have multiple hosts.

Duncan

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[Michelle_Laveri]

Clearly we need parallel start-ups - otherwise every VM you had would start up in series and the main bottle neck would be the recovery plan...

I've found it odd when I first started working with SRM that there was only one start-up priority that allowed you strictly control boot order...

Also, you wouldn't know about "parallel" start-up until you RTFM, bought my book or did the training course - what i mean is there is nothing in the product that would give the game away - unless you watched the recovery plan closely.

I would like to see High, and so all - all have the ability to have a start-up order with the 4th category called "I don't care start these up in any order you please!". I forget now - do the lower order priorties still you allow to move the VMs up and down - or is that supressed in the UI. Cos if its there, it doesn't do anything for ya!

Regards

Mike