The primary goal of our solution was to simplify our Business Continuity process. Losing the performance history at this point was considered an acceptable loss. The company that we work for is a 24x7 worldwide organization located in New Orleans, with a vivid memory of Katrina. Maximum uptime is the primary goal.
The script assumes that most information, folders, resource pools, etc, is already predefined in each Data Center inside of a single Virtual Center Database. The script handles the shutdown of the VMs, removing them from inventory at primary Data Center, syncing and promoting of our EMC Clariion luns, updating the appropriate EMC storage group at the appropriate time, and handles the re-register and startup of the VM's at the secondary datacenter. It can handle the steps above regardless of which Data Center is currently hosting the VMs.
As a side note, we have fully tested the script and have moved our test servers back and forth between New Orleans and Dallas no less than 10 times using the script, even though it is only about a week old. I designed the concept and wrote the script over a day and a half period last week and we have been testing it extensively since then. We have a number of additional features that we plan to add to it, but wanted to get it in the contest as soon as possible.
