VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager - 6.1 User Manual

VMware Site Recovery Manager 6.1

Evaluation Guide

Revised September

2015

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Contents

Introduction .......................................................................................................................................................................... 3

Terminology .................................................................................................................................................................... 3

About This Evaluation Guide ................................................................................................................................... 5

Requirements ....................................................................................................................................................................... 5

Evaluation Workflow ......................................................................................................................................................... 6

Overview ........................................................................................................................................................................... 6

Evaluation Checklist..................................................................................................................................................... 8

Exercise 1: Pairing Sites .................................................................................................................................................... 9

Exercise 2: Configure Inventory Mappings .............................................................................................................. 11

Exercise 3: Configure placeholder datastore ........................................................................................................ 13

Exercise 4: Add Array Manager and Enable Array Pair (If Using Array Replication) .......................... 13

Exercise 5: Create a Protection Group .....................................................................................................................14

Exercise 6: Create a Recovery Plan ........................................................................................................................... 17

Exercise 7: Testing a Recovery Plan .......................................................................................................................... 19

History Reports ............................................................................................................................................................. 21

Exercise 8: Running a Recovery Plan ........................................................................................................................ 21

Roles and Permissions .............................................................................................................................................. 22

Exercise 9: Reprotect a Recovery Plan and Fail Back ...................................................................................... 23

Exercise 10: Virtual Machine Recovery Properties ............................................................................................. 23

Priority Groups .............................................................................................................................................................24

Dependencies ...............................................................................................................................................................24

Shutdown Actions ...................................................................................................................................................... 25

Startup Actions ............................................................................................................................................................ 25

Pre and Post Power On Steps ............................................................................................................................... 26

IP Customization ......................................................................................................................................................... 26

Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................................................... 28

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Introduction

Site Recovery Manager a site migration and disaster recovery solution from VMware. It is fully integrated with VMware vCenter Server™ and VMware vSphere® Web Client. Site Recovery Manager provides orchestration and non-disruptive testing of centralized recovery plans. Site Recovery Manager works in conjunction with various replication solutions including VMware vSphere Replication™ to automate the process of migrating and recovering virtual machine workloads.

Multiple recovery plans can be configured to migrate individual applications and entire sites providing finer control over what virtual machines are failed over and failed back. This also enables flexible testing schedules. For example, one application owner requires quarterly disaster recovery testing while another application owner must test once per month. This is easily accomplished with Site Recovery Manager.

Sites that share stretched storage can take advantage of zero-downtime virtual machine migrations. Site Recovery manager can orchestrate the live migration of virtual machines using Cross-vCenter vMotion also known as “Long Distance vMotion.”

Storage policy protection groups enable automatic protection of virtual machines residing on array-replicated storage. Items such as networks, folders, and resource pools are mapped between sites in Site Recovery Manager to further automate the migration and recovery of virtual machines between sites. Utilizing VMware NSX™ universal logical switches with Site Recovery Manager enables automatic mapping of networks and virtual machine security policies across sites. NSX supports the spanning of layer 2 networks eliminating the need to customize virtual machine IP address settings during failover and migration. These features reduce complexity, improve reliability, and minimize recovery times.

Site Recovery Manager roles can be assigned to specific individuals and groups in vCenter Server. For example, an administrator might wish to allow several application owners to test recovery plans, but limit the actual migration and failover of virtual machines to just a few individuals in the organization. Site Recovery Manager also includes vCenter Server alarms for monitoring and alerting.

The key features provided by Site Recovery Manager are:

• Integration with third-party array replication technologies and vSphere Replication

• Protection for virtually any workload regardless of operating system and application

• Centralized recovery plans with predefined virtual machine startup sequences

• Workflows for planned migration, disaster avoidance, and disaster recovery

• Automated IP address customization

• Non-disruptive recovery plan testing

• Familiar management user interface in vSphere Web Client

• Roles with preconfigured permissions

• Detailed history reports for testing, migration, and failover auditing

Terminology

Recovery time objective (RTO): Targeted amount of time a business process should be restored after a disaster or disruption in order to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in business continuity.

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re covered by one or more patents listed at http://www.vmware.com/go/patents.

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Recovery point objective (RPO): Maximum age of files recovered from backup storage for normal operations to resume if a system goes offline as a result of a hardware, program, or communications failure.

Array replication: Replication across one or more storage controllers, which eliminates the processing overhead from servers.

vSphere Replication: Host-based virtual machine replication technology created by VMware included with vSphere Essentials Plus Kit and higher editions.

Logical unit number (LUN): Number used to identify a logical unit, which is a device addressed by the SCSI protocol or Storage Area Network (SAN) protocols.

Consistency group: One or more LUNs or volumes that are replicated at the same time. When recovering items in a consistency group, all items are restored to the same point in time.

Failover: Method of recovering applications and services to a secondary system when the primary system experiences a failure or disaster.

Failback: Restoring applications and services from a secondary system back to the primary system after a failover has occurred.

Reprotect: Specific to Site Recovery Manager, the process of reversing the direction of replication and enabling recovery plans for a failback event.

Protected virtual machine: Virtual machine that is replicated from one site to another and is included in a Site Recovery Manager recovery plan for failover and failback.

Protected site: Site that contains protected virtual machines.

Recovery site: Site where protected virtual machines are recovered in the event of a failover.

NOTE: It is possible for the same site to serve as a protected site and recovery site when replication is occurring in both directions and Site Recovery Manager is protecting virtual machines at both sites.

Datastore group: One or more datastores that are treated as a unit in Site Recovery Manager. A common example is a consistency group in an array replication solution.

Protection group: Collection of protected virtual machines that are migrated or failed over as a unit.

Storage policy protection group: Protection group configured with a tag-based storage policy that enables automatic protection of a virtual machine in Site Recovery Manager simply by assigning the tag-based storage policy to the virtual machine.

Recovery plan: Documented process to recover a business IT infrastructure in the event of a disaster. A recovery plan in Site Recovery Manager includes one or more protection groups.

Storage replication adapter: Software components provided by array replication vendors that are installed on the Site Recovery Manager servers to enable communication between Site Recovery Manager and array replication solutions.

Placeholder virtual machine: Virtual machine created in the vCenter Server inventory at the recovery site when a virtual machine is protected by Site Recovery Manager. Placeholder virtual machines do not have virtual disks attached to it so the storage capacity consumed by placeholder virtual machines is very small.

Inventory mappings: In Site Recovery Manager, the default networks, folders, and resources for protected virtual machines to use at the recovery site.

NSX universal logical switch: Virtual switch that allows layer 2 networks to span multiple sites.

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s and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

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re covered by one or more patents listed at http://www.vmware.com/go/patents.

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About This Evaluation Guide

The purpose of this document is to provide a structured guide for IT professionals to evaluate the primary features and benefits of using Site Recovery Manager to automate planned migration and disaster recovery workflows for applications and services running in virtual machines. The exercises in this guide should be completed in the order prescribed for best results. Some exercises have dependencies on previously completed items.

This guide does not contain detailed steps on performing activities such as installation and configuration since these steps are already included in the product documentation.

Requirements

It is assumed the following items are already properly installed and configured in a nonproduction environment designated for this evaluation.

• Domain Name System (DNS) server with forward and reverse lookup enabled.

• Two or more vSphere hosts - a minimum of one designated for each site.

• Two vCenter Server 6.0 U1 virtual machines - one for each site.

• Two virtual machines with a supported Microsoft Windows operating system and Site

Recovery Manager 6.1 installed - one for each site.

Recommendation: Verify the Windows operating systems for the Site Recovery Manager host virtual machines are compatible with the Site Recovery Manager using the

VMware Compatibility Guides. Consult the Site Recovery Manager Documentation when

installing and configuring Site Recovery Manager.

• Array replication or vSphere Replication 6.1 deployed and configured for use in the

evaluation environment.

Recommendation: While array replication supported by Site Recovery Manager can be used for this evaluation, vSphere Replication 6.1 is recommended for simplicity and compatibility with a wide variety of storage types including VMware Virtual SAN™. A minimum of one vSphere Replication virtual appliance must be deployed and configured for use with the vCenter Server instance at each site. For more information on deploying and configuring vSphere Replication, see the vSphere Replication 6.1

documentation. vSphere Replication does not require installation of a storage

replication adapter.

NOTE: Storage policy protection groups, cross-vCenter vMotion with stretched storage, and NSX integration require array-based replication. These features are not required to successfully complete the steps in this guide.

• One or more Windows and/or Linux based virtual machines with VMware Tools

installed, which will be protected by Site Recovery Manager.

• Static IP addresses and DNS host (A) records assigned to all vSphere hosts and virtual

machines in the evaluation environment.

• Reliable network connectivity between both sites and all components in the Site

Recovery Manager evaluation environment. See Network Ports for Site Recovery

Manager (2103394) and TCP and UDP Ports required to access VMware vCenter Server, VMware ESXi and ESX hosts, and other network components (1012382) for more

information on network port requirements.

• Adequate storage capacity for all of the components above.

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s and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

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re covered by one or more patents listed at http://www.vmware.com/go/patents.

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The figure below shows a logical diagram of how the evaluation environment can be configured. Network connectivity is required between the two sites, but they do not have to be geographically separated to satisfy the requirements of the evaluation exercises.

Figure 1: Example evaluation environment.

Recommendation: Use default settings for all components - installation paths, TCP port settings, and so on - wherever possible, to minimize complexity in the evaluation environment. Use consistent naming conventions, usernames, and passwords during evaluation environment deployment.

Recommendation: Use descriptive names for the components such as servers and port groups in a VMware virtualized environment. These names appear in the user interface and Site Recovery Manager history reports. Descriptive names improve the quality of these reports and ease troubleshooting. Use the same naming convention for items such as network port groups at the protected site and the recovery site, as this will simplify inventory mappings.

Evaluation Workflow

Overview

The following exercises are covered in this document:

1. Pairing sites

2. Configure inventory mappings

3. Configure placeholder datastore

4. Add array manager and enable array pair (if using array replication)

5. Creating a protection group

6. Creating a recovery plan

7. Testing a recovery plan

8. Running a recovery plan

9. Performing fail-back

10. Customizing virtual machine recovery properties

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s and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com

re covered by one or more patents listed at http://www.vmware.com/go/patents.

VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other mark

The following checklist can be used to track the progress of the evaluation at a high level. The sections after the checklist provide more details on each exercise, including recommendations, documentation references, VMware Knowledge Base articles, and other resources. This document does not contain detailed, step-by-step instructions for completing the tasks in each exercise. These instructions are documented in items such as the Site Recovery Manager documentation. In most cases, one exercise is dependent on another one. For example, a recovery plan cannot be created until at least one protection group is created. Perform the exercises in the order documented in this guide.

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s and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

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re covered by one or more patents listed at http://www.vmware.com/go/patents.

VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other mark

Evaluation Checklist

SUCCESS CRITERIA RESULT

Sites paired

Inventory mappings configured

Placeholder datastores defined

Array managers added and enabled (if using array replication)

Protection group created

Recovery plan created

Test a recovery plan

Run a recovery plan

Reprotect a recovery plan

Run a reprotected recovery plan (fail-back)

Customized virtual machine recovery properties

Run a recovery plan with virtual machine customization

NOTES:

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re covered by one or more patents listed at http://www.vmware.com/go/patents.

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Exercise 1: Pairing Sites

It is assumed that Site Recovery Manager has been installed in both sites, a replication solution has been deployed, and all virtual machines that will be protected by Site Recovery Manager are being replicated.

Site Recovery Manager is managed using vSphere Web Client. During the installation of Site Recovery manager, a plugin is installed in vSphere Web Client and an icon labeled “Site Recovery” is displayed.

Figure 2. Site Recovery Manager in vSphere Web Client

The first step in configuring Site Recovery Manager is pairing sites. The most common configuration is pairing two sites - a protected site and a recovery site. That is the configuration prescribed for these evaluation exercises. Site Recovery Manager also supports “shared” sites that consist of a single vCenter Server and multiple Site Recovery Manager servers. An example of this is a shared recovery site for branch offices.

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