vSphere Replication 5.5u1 Single vCenter, Multiple site design

[thomasmaddox]

  What is the best practice design/deployment of VR appliance(s) in a single vCenter design with multiple sites?

- Would you deploy the VRA in the Source datacenter or Target Datacenter

- Would you deploy 2 VRA's, 1 in each site?

Thanks,

[rh5592]

You can refer to the vSphere Replication Overview (page 7) document http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere/VMware-vSphere-Replication-Overview.pdf

Normally, you will deploy 1 VRA (you can only pair 1 VRA to 1 vCenter Server) in the main site  and then deploy only VRS on the remote sites.

[thomasmaddox]

Would it be more beneficial to deploy a VRS in the source site and the VRA in the remote site. That way in case of a disaster, I would only need to manually recover my vCenter, and then I would have my VRA available to recover my vm's. Thoughts?

Obviously 2 vCenter's and 2 VRA is optimal, but not in the budget for this year.

Thanks,

[NEET123]

thomas,

how do you recover a vm manually without a virtual center, only VRS on the remote site, the main site is totally down?

also is it possible to replicate a vm to a secondary storage and to a remote site with one vcenter only?

thanks,

neet123

[sclarkenetcraft]

If you don't have the VCenter Server (Appliance) up and running:

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2012/09/21/can-i-protect-my-vcenter-server-with-vsphere-replication/

Try the above process (you may need to update commands for your version of esx)