Hello,
I am looking for the best practices which should be taken in consideration while designing DR in two site mode and looking for Array-based Replication.
what and how should the DB server replicated, if they are required to, should they be bi-directional Replicated?
How should Network be considered? My SRM will be part of Management cluster, does Management Network will be sufficient for DR activities or separate dedicated VLAN is required?
Thanks
BR,
MG
As usual the answer to this question is - "It Depends".
You may be able to get away with using just your management network for your DR scenario. A dedicated VLAN is not "required" but it probably makes good design sense to separate them. If you wouldn't keep all your traffic in a single VLAN in your production network, why would you do it in your DR network. Perhaps you have a valid reason, but it would be a use case.
As far as a DB server replicating, I can say that changes such as re-indexing cause almost all of the blocks of the database to change, therefor you're re-replicating almost the entire DB even though the data isn't changing, the blocks are. Consider skipping the TempDB when replicating. You will find out that the TempDB is what you spend most of your time replicating and it's relatively not useful data.
Of course using a storage array, this means making sure your TempDB and paging files are on a LUN that isn't being replicated, so it can't be shared with your replicated data.
If you're asking if the vCenter or SRM databases need to be replicated, the answer is they don't.
you'll have a separate vcenter and database for each site.
I hope this was useful.
Don't protect Active Directory Domain Controllers - that whole pause-replicate-start timing thing can get messy. It's better to have some permanent AD DCs at the recovery site.
Look into OTV so your guests don't need to change IPs when they failover.
As noted above, you may need to change your guest configurations so that page/swap files aren't chewing up your replication bandwidth.
Start from the other end - What goals does your DR procedure need to meet (RPO, RTO ...)
