Hi,
I just tried a planned migration with interesting results and I would like to ask you to give me an advice for best practice on that:
- two sites, each with 3 ESXi 5.0 hosts and its own vCenter+SRM server running together on a VM with standalone win2008 r2 sp1 server (not part of a domain)
- each site has its own NetApp box with two primary NFS volumes and two replicas from the other site (snapmirror) plus one non-replicated mini-volume for SRM placeholders
- both primary volumes at each site are covered by protection groups and a recovery plan. It means SRM+vCenter server is part of its own protection group
In a disaster recovery mode, to finish the recovery plan, the vcenter+srm from the protection site has to be started, so it needs to be started on the recovery side.
In planned migration mode, the recovery plan cannot finnish because automated shutdown oh the vcenter+srm on the protected side breaks down the migration.
Distaster recovery is more important than planned migration, so I think that protecting vcenter+srm server by its own measures is all right. But what about the planned migration ? Is there a way to tell the SRM at the protected site to do everything what is needed and then shutdown without errors preventing the recovery plan to be completed from the recovery site ? I hope there is a better solution than to have another pair replicated volume just for the vcenter+srm server. As a workaround now I need to stop the rest of VMs at the protected site manually and re-run the recovery plan in DR mode once for moving to recovery site and then again to tell SRM that the machines were powered off at the protected site before it can advance to reprotection mode, which is far from an ideal solution.
Thanks on advance for comments and suggestions.
David