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dales123
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Essentials Plus offsite dr options

HI all,

I'm planning a new vmware install for a company and am wondering about my options for offsite DR with ess+, I plan on purchasing 2 sans (likely vnxe 3100's) one on the production and one at the DR location and set up replication between the two. So with ess+ would I be able to have 2 host's at the prod site and 1 maybe two (one switched off) at the DR site using one ess+ AK. Also how would that work in relation to creating the vm's at the dr site (can ess+ create multiple datacenters)!?. One replication had occured would I just create new vm's  and attach the vmdks to the vm's.

I'm labbing this out but a bit of expert advice wouldn't go amiss.

Kind Regards Dale VCP3+5
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marcelo_soares
Champion
Champion

About the licensing, if you have only 1 vcenter and 2 hosts licensed, I don't think you may have other vcenter and ESX turned on on another site (powered off maybe there is no problem). If you are replicating everything, you can have this spare environment down and, in case of a disaster, power everything on present the replicated LUNs, mount it to the ESXs and add each VM to the inventory by eight clicking the VMX file of each one and choosing "Add to Inventory". This may be scriptable (vmkfstools and vmware-cmd are your friends) so you don't need to be cliccking everything.

Marcelo

Marcelo Soares
dales123
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thanks for the tips, I was sure you could add to inventory but I've been at this new company nearly a year and have not touched any serious vmware kit for that long, (that little tidbit has obviously been pushed out of my brain for something else). My understanding is with ess+ you can have 3 hosts with up to two processors each with 192GB max across all 3 hosts (I assume that it does not dimish the ram figure if you only actually have 1 processor per host), so I was thinking two hosts in prod site 2 in DR site with only one powered on at any one time for UM.

I would run vcenter as a vm so should our prod site suffer a warp core overload I could power up the esxi boxes at the dr site and have vcenter boot up over there for my convienence. Scripting sounds like a good idea to (I dooo like writing belt and braces scripts so that will keep me entertained for a while).

Regarding the DR site how do you handle IP address allocation. When vm's replicate across do you power them up and statically assign then a different subnet address and switch them back off again or will replication override these modifications meaning you just have to do all the IP fiddlement when powering the vm's on during a DR event? One thought is that I could configure the DC vm's at the DR site to give out static reservations based on mac addresses to cope with the subnet change.

Regards

Dale

Kind Regards Dale VCP3+5
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