Indeed your correct, overlooked the Advanced part, DRS isn't supported. But another question for you : Do you only use the hardware ont the recovery site for DR purposes or do you also make use o...
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Indeed your correct, overlooked the Advanced part, DRS isn't supported. But another question for you : Do you only use the hardware ont the recovery site for DR purposes or do you also make use of the hardware for other purposes like for example testing? Is not you can always create a business case to buy an Enterprise license and use the recovery site for testing purposes. In case a disaster happens and a failover is invoked you can add to the recovery plan to shutdown your test VMs on the recovery site, before starting the SRM protected VMs. This way you make full use of all hardware on the protected and the recovery site. Looking at you question again, it makes me think. If you create a cluster on the recovery site and map that cluster to you cluster on the protected site. All VMs that are protected will be booted on that cluster during failover. Ok you won't have DRS so resources aren't distributed over the hosts, but they are running and you can manually vMotion VMs to one host to another. Point is that is you want to map individual VMs to ESX host, your making your SRM design very complex and hard to maintain. Rather go for the mapping of clusters and take into account that you have to manually vMotion VMs between hosts to create a balanced resource distribution (or buy DRS ). It makes your life a lot easier.