SRM restart order and protection groups

[TheVMinator]

I have a number of VMs with different relationships and startup order needs.  What dictates whether I need to put them in different protection groups, or put them in the same protection group but just modify the startup order within the protection group?

[jhague]

‌Your protection groups will probably reflect the criticality of your VMs and are grouped logically in how you'd want to fail them over e.g.

Protection group 1: Business critical

Protection group 2: Production

Protection group 3: Test & Dev

You might want them to be more granular or if you don't have many VMs you might have a single group. It all depends how you'd want to handle a failover or even testing.

The startup order determines what order you want your VMs to start within that group according to application dependencies, e.g. AD, then database, then App server then finally web servers - so that your applications come up in a consistent fashion.

[vbrowncoat · Accepted solution]

Protection groups are a group of VMs you want to recover together. Restart order (defined through priority groups and dependencies) is set at the recovery plan level.

See this blog post for details on protection groups: SRM Protection Group Design Considerations - VMware vSphere Blog

[TheVMinator]

ok thanks again