Hi All
We have SRM 5.0 protecting our VM's with EMC VNX array based replication in Asynchronous mode.
To prove our DR capabilities we need to do a full failover (planned option) and run machines live from our DR site for 2 hours.
In preparation for this I have a test LUN that's in its own protection group / recovery plan to play around with but due to only having 5 spare licenses I cant create many VM's
One of the questions I have is around the length of time to do the failover from the VMware / SRM perspective as the number of VM's protected increase (we have 130).
If we exclude the storage sync requirements for now as i know that is going to be an unknown dependent on the rate of change.
I created 2 test VM's on my Test SRM LUN, executed a recovery plan to failover my test group to the 2nd site, re-protected , Failed back to primary again and then finally re-protected so I was back in original state.
I then created an additional 3 VM's so the total was 5 and then repeated the same procedure again.
I noticed when looking at the recovery steps that most steps where similar in elapsed time, it looks as though on most steps like powering off and on VM's is roughly the same regardless of if you have 5 or 50 VMs, the only exception to this was the Prepare Protected site VM's for migration which increased when the additional VMs were added.
What's actually happening under the hood at this stage? is there a rough guide to allow you to calculate times, e.g allow 1 min per VM or anything like that?
Also on a separate note has anyone done a failover / failback using a VNX array (Block Fibre) in Async mode using Mirrorview. We have spoken to EMC about the failback side of it, does it do deltas or full re sync and have had 2 conflicting answers back from them, this is an issue for us as we are doing failover and failback in 1 weekend, if its a full re sync then we just wont have the time window to re syncall the data.
Thanks
Nick