vbrowncoat's Accepted Solutions

Yes, you can use vSphere Replication between vCenters as well. To do that you would want to deploy VR appliances to each vCenter and then connect them. How to do this is outlined in the VR instal... See more...
Yes, you can use vSphere Replication between vCenters as well. To do that you would want to deploy VR appliances to each vCenter and then connect them. How to do this is outlined in the VR install and config, and administration docs. BTW my first name is GS. Cheers!
Short answer, no. Longer answer, you may be able to do this in some ways but there will be a lot of rework and while you are doing that you will be unprotected. Another option where you wou... See more...
Short answer, no. Longer answer, you may be able to do this in some ways but there will be a lot of rework and while you are doing that you will be unprotected. Another option where you would potentially have less time unprotected would be to Deploy SRM & vCenter at the new site. Deploy a second SRM server at your protected site. Associate/pair this SRM server with your new DR site. Configure your array replication, one LUN/Consistency group at a time to point to the new site, while doing this create new PGs & RPs for the moved LUNs This would have the advantage of an easier fail back plan also. Hope this helps
That is great that you are testing so frequently. Nice to hear. It really depends on your environment and your requirements. When I was a customer and partner helping customers I usually found it... See more...
That is great that you are testing so frequently. Nice to hear. It really depends on your environment and your requirements. When I was a customer and partner helping customers I usually found it to be once every 6-12 months, though this was really more to keep the business happy, from my standpoint a test of the recovery plan was sufficient. A failover/failback might make sense after upgrading, though it wouldn't necessarily have to be the entire plan. It could just be done for a subset or test group. As I mentioned at the beginning though, it really depends on your comfort level and your business requirements.
There isn't a way to directly prioritize VMs with vSphere Replication. VR dynamically schedules replications to try to meet RPO for all replicated VMs so if you have some VMs that aren't meeting ... See more...
There isn't a way to directly prioritize VMs with vSphere Replication. VR dynamically schedules replications to try to meet RPO for all replicated VMs so if you have some VMs that aren't meeting the RPO I'd suggest reducing your RPO settings. You could also take a look at the VR bandwidth Calculator: http://www.vmware.com/vrcalculator and determine what settings your pipe can support.
The only way to automate this process is through Site Recovery Manager.  Automating and orchestrating BC/DR is a huge part of the value that SRM offers. The other additional benefit is the abilit... See more...
The only way to automate this process is through Site Recovery Manager.  Automating and orchestrating BC/DR is a huge part of the value that SRM offers. The other additional benefit is the ability to non-disruptively test your recovery plans. Does this answer your question?
Protected site hosts are restored from standby (DPM is disabled) so that the storage can be unmounted from them and set to read-only. I echo what GSS says, the issue with the LUN demote error ... See more...
Protected site hosts are restored from standby (DPM is disabled) so that the storage can be unmounted from them and set to read-only. I echo what GSS says, the issue with the LUN demote error is very likely with the SRA and therefore EMC. I think the protected site hosts from standby issue may be related to that as well (not able to unmount LUN?) Regarding your VM shutting down, you are saying that the VM successfully shuts down? The default is for SRM to wait 5 mins (300 secs) for the shutdown, if the VM takes longer than that you would want to change the timeout value in advanced settings. See here for details: Site Recovery Manager 6.0 Documentation Center
The limit is 10 VR appliances per vCenter (regardless of linked-mode use) so an additional vCenter would allow you to deploy a VR appliance to your 11th site (and 9 more in the future).
It depends on the size of your VMs, their change rate, how many points in time you are keeping, how far apart, etc. There is no formula for this as there are too many variables. If you want to... See more...
It depends on the size of your VMs, their change rate, how many points in time you are keeping, how far apart, etc. There is no formula for this as there are too many variables. If you want to get an idea, take an average VM for your environment (change rate, size, etc), set the MPIT where you want, run it for the duration (eg. if you are doing 6 points per day for 4 days, you'll need to wait 4 days) and see how big all of the snapshots are at the recovery site. Does this answer your question?
You can use RP to mirror your VM datastores to multiple locations, you just can't use SRM to protect VMs being replicated to multiple locations. SRM can only protect a single VM replication. To b... See more...
You can use RP to mirror your VM datastores to multiple locations, you just can't use SRM to protect VMs being replicated to multiple locations. SRM can only protect a single VM replication. To be clear you can use SRM to protect one replication and still have others. Other companies do replicate their datastores to two or more locations and use SRM as I outlined above. SRM is licensed per protected VM. The storage used doesn't matter for SRM licensing.
More than likely you want each of your sites to have all services so they can function independent of each other (as they would in the case of a disaster). If you don't do this you are kind of de... See more...
More than likely you want each of your sites to have all services so they can function independent of each other (as they would in the case of a disaster). If you don't do this you are kind of defeating the purpose of "Site" Recovery Manager. Does this make sense?
This is normal behavior. When you run a recovery plan in DR mode it will attempt to shutdown VMs at the protected site but if it is unable to will just continue with recovery plan. What you ar... See more...
This is normal behavior. When you run a recovery plan in DR mode it will attempt to shutdown VMs at the protected site but if it is unable to will just continue with recovery plan. What you are experiencing with the VM with disconnected storage is kind of a "zombie" VM. When you disconnect storage the VM often continues to run because there are a number of things stored in memory that allow it to function in a limited sense. As you experienced it may even be able to respond to pings. More than likely though it is really unable to do any work and therefore "dead" but not aware of it. Until vSphere 6 there was no simple way to deal with this. Now in vSphere 6 there is VMCP (VM Component Protection) which will monitor connectivity to VM storage and if an issue arises (like an APD or PDL) VMCP will shutdown the VM and restart it on a healthy host (eg. one that has access to storage). Does this answer your questions?
VM monitoring will restart a VM if HA stops detecting VMtools heartbeats as well as network and storage IO from the VM. If a host loses access to a datastore as far as HA is concerned it depen... See more...
VM monitoring will restart a VM if HA stops detecting VMtools heartbeats as well as network and storage IO from the VM. If a host loses access to a datastore as far as HA is concerned it depends on what version of vSphere is in use and how that access is lost (APD or PDL - see details here VMware KB: Permanent Device Loss (PDL) and All-Paths-Down (APD) in vSphere 5.x ).  If running vSphere 6, HA now has a feature (VM Component Protection) that will restart all VMs impacted by an APD or PDL on a non-impacted host. If using prior versions of vSphere even with VM monitoring enabled user involvement will be required as VM monitoring only restarts the VM (not on a new host) (vSphere 5.1 Storage Enhancements – Part 4: All Paths Down (APD) | CormacHogan.com). Does this answer your questions?
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=VR600&productId=491&rPId=7502 The iso contains the ova/ovf files
Yes, you can have 2 protected sites and a single recovery site. You will need an SRM server at both protected sites and 2 SRM servers (one for each remote site). See: Site Recovery Manager 6.... See more...
Yes, you can have 2 protected sites and a single recovery site. You will need an SRM server at both protected sites and 2 SRM servers (one for each remote site). See: Site Recovery Manager 6.0 Documentation Center http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1014640 If you are interested in other topologies you can also see: http://www.benmeadowcroft.com/archive/2015/01/12/vmware-srm-topologies/ Does this answer your questions?
NetApp SnapManager is required for application quiescing with NetApp. SRM doesn't add any application quiescing capabilities to NetApp (or any other array vendor). SRM monitors, can trigger, a... See more...
NetApp SnapManager is required for application quiescing with NetApp. SRM doesn't add any application quiescing capabilities to NetApp (or any other array vendor). SRM monitors, can trigger, and in some cases reverses replication, but it doesn't change/impact how replication runs. If you are conducting a planned migration (or a DR failover and SRM can communicate with the protected site SRM & vCenter servers), SRM will replicate storage, power down the VMs gracefully and then replicate again so there isn't a need in these cases for app-consistent replication. Does this answer your questions?
The master is aware of where VMs are running and will attempt to balance where VMs are started. Reservations and overhead are the only things taken into account from a usage standpoint (not the a... See more...
The master is aware of where VMs are running and will attempt to balance where VMs are started. Reservations and overhead are the only things taken into account from a usage standpoint (not the actual resources consumed on a host) because HA is only concerned with getting VMs restarted (and if they have reservations getting them those resources, which they have to have in order to start). If DRS is enabled, and available, HA will work with DRS to move workloads so that larger VMs can start. If you have larger VMs the thing to think about is what admission control policy you use. It may make sense to use slot based if all your VMs are large and close to the same size, or dedicated failover host if you don't want to have to deal with DRS shuffling workloads. Just depends on your environment and your requirements. Does this answer your questions?
You can use storage vMotion with ABR within the same consistency group. In VR 6.0 you can use a dedicated replication interface instead of the mgmt interface. This was possible in 5.5 but was... See more...
You can use storage vMotion with ABR within the same consistency group. In VR 6.0 you can use a dedicated replication interface instead of the mgmt interface. This was possible in 5.5 but was more of a workaround than a feature. 1. Yes 2. Not sure what you mean by "never compete". Are you looking for RPO? In that case, yes, ABR can go lower than the current 15 mins that VR offers. Otherwise "performance" wise they should be similar. Check this blog post for lots of details on the two SRM - Array Based Replication vs. vSphere Replication | VMware vSphere Blog - VMware Blogs Does this answer your questions?
Definite yes. VMware Product Interoperability Matrixes
Read this from Duncan Epping: All host failed, how does HA respond? Quote (my bold and underline for emphasis): I figured it wouldn’t hurt to describe the steps that vSphere 5.0 takes. Pow... See more...
Read this from Duncan Epping: All host failed, how does HA respond? Quote (my bold and underline for emphasis): I figured it wouldn’t hurt to describe the steps that vSphere 5.0 takes. Power Outage, all hosts down Power on hosts Election process will be kicked off. Master will be elected. Master reads protected list Master initiates restarts for those VMs which were listed as protected but not running Now the one thing I want to point out is that with vSphere 5.0 we will also track if the VM was cleanly powered off, as in initiated by the admin, or powered-off due to a failure/isolation. In the case they are cleanly powered off they will not be restarted, but in this scenario of course they are not cleanly powered off and as such the VMs will be powered on. The great thing about vSphere 5.0 is that you no longer need to know which hosts where your primary nodes so you can power these on first to ensure quick recovery… No, you can power on any host and HA will sort it out for you. The behavior is the same in 5.1 - 6.0
Yes, snapshots are only allowed/supported when triggered by VADP.