SRM Recovery and Protected site vCenters in same site

[ncolt]

Hi, currently we have a recovery site and a protected site vCenter - in separate sites as you would expect. But after an outage in the protected site, there were complications which meant the vCenter could not power on. As a workaround, until we implement vCenter HA, we are thinking about moving the vCenter to the recovery site. This would be straightforward without SRM. Is it supported to have the recovery and protected vCenters in the same site - ie recovery site. There are stretched vLANs and a good network connection between sites so everything should still work.

[vFouad]

I think you have answered your own question "There are stretched vLANs and a good network connection between sites so everything should still work"

Things should work on a day to day basis from a technical standpoint; however let's consider the time you need SRM - a Site wide disaster.

Assuming the hosts and VM's in Prod are unreachable.

SRM could be used to perform a disaster recovery, assuming SRM is on the  Production site, I can't see an issue with this failover working.

If the situation is reversed say the protected workload is running on the recovery site and the recovery site goes down; then as your vCenter is on the Recovery site, you will have no access to SRM to perform a Disaster failback to your production site as the production vCenter is not accessible.

Assuming array based replication you could perform some manual recovery operations; if you are using vSphere Replication then the recovery would be a slightly more complex manual recovery process...

If that risk is acceptable, then yes you could work this way. From a support standpoint, there would be difficulties with troubleshooting if the VC's were unavailable, but in the day to day running state there should be no issue. This should not be a reason for denial of support, it is not a best practice, but if the situation is exactly as you described, then there should be no technical issue.

Just always double check your firewalls and DNS, and verify that nothing is being false positive blocked by deep packet inspection/virus detection on the site to site firewalls.