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Champion
Champion

Dave,

Do you have reploicated storage to the remote site?

What I did in a previous role was to simply use the storage replication for replication of all data between sites. (ie vmdks etc) - and created connections to the relevant datastores on each end (we had an ESX cluster at each end, that had matched portgroups and datastores)

We did not have a stretched VLan so the first hurdle was migration of machoines and what would happen to IP addresses.

Our solution was to create all VMs with static mac addresses and give them DHCP IP addresses. We then simply created a reservation for each VM in each Datacentre's DHCP, so we always knew what IP would be allocated.

Next we simply scripteed the failover. In simple terms, the failover wokrs as follows:

1. Unregister all VMs from source ESX hosts

2. Failover storage to remote site

3. Import VMs to ESX cluster on remote site

the key pieces of the puzzle were

  • Logging the config of the source cluster to an XML file daily, so that we could know whjich ports groups / resource pools etc needed to mapped
  • Duplicataion of all PortGroups / Resource Pools etc whenever they were created
  • daily script to verify that the clusters and ESX hosts at each end wereconsistent

In our case, it was NetApp storage - but anything will work.

I call it DR on a shoestring.

One day I might dig all the scripts etc up and publish a full plan online for anyone hoping to DR on a budget.

Incidentally

RPO - was about 15 minutes (max lag on storage migrations)

RTO was about 15 minutes - so all in, pretty effective

We actually used th eprocess to failover between DCs several times (controlled)

Good luck

One day I will virtualise myself . . .