Hi all,
I have an environment with two sites A and B. B is used almost exclusively for DR using SRM (other than a handful of service VMs).
This environment began life as vSphere 5.0 with one vCenter Server at each site, running both SRM and UM all on the same VM. It is relatively small in terms of Host and VMs so this has worked well.
Late 2016 I upgraded to 5.5 and then on to 6.0 and obviously SRM was upgraded at the same time. Again all working well apart from one small gripe I have and having read some of the new features from 6.5 etc I am now thinking about changing the deployment a little to work a bit better and be a little more streamlined.
Namely, site A and B have never been joined in link-mode so they need to be managed separately and of course, although the SRM nodes need to communicate they didn't necessarily need the vCenter Servers linked.
I would like to use the new 6.5 wizard to migrate vCenter and UM from the Windows Server to the appliance and based on the size of my environments everything embedded would be fine. I don't think the Platform Module would need to be offloaded to its own appliance for example.
Finally my question. What would be the best practice deployment and how best to migrate to this deployment? i.e. Should I migrate to a single appliance at each site and configure enhanced linked mode? If so, what are the steps for linking? This I believe would result in a single appliance at each site for vCenter and UM using the embedded DB but we would be left with the Windows Server running SRM only. I have found no evidence of SRM being available as an appliance or embedded into the vCenter/UM appliance so I'm assuming this has to be kept separate?
Kind regards all,
Ed Hazelden