This chapter describes the VMware Site Recovery Manager solution and the minimum setup for the solution.

The VMware Site Recovery Manager is a continuity and disaster recovery solution that provides automation for the following tasks:

The VMware Site Recovery Manager enables administrators of virtualized environments to automatically fail over the whole environment or parts of it to a backup site. It uses the mirroring capabilities of the underlying storage to create a copy of the data on a second location (for example, a disaster recovery data center). This solution ensures that two copies of the data are always available and production can run on either of them.

During normal production, the virtual machines (VMs) are running on ESXi hosts and storage devices in the primary data center (the production site). Additional ESXi servers and storage devices are standing by in the backup data center (recovery site). Mirroring functions of the storage systems create a copy of the data on the storage device at the backup location. In a failover case, all VMs are shut down on the primary site (if this action is still possible or required) and are restarted on the ESXi hosts of the backup data center, accessing the data on the backup storage system.

This solution requires many steps, for example, stopping any running VMs on the primary side, stopping the mirroring, making the copy accessible for the backup ESXi servers, and registering and restarting the VMs on the backup ESXi servers.

VMware Site Recovery Manager can automatically perform all these steps and fail over complete virtual environments with “one click.” This solution saves time, eliminates user errors, and provides a detailed documentation of the disaster recovery plan. VMware Site Recovery Manager can also perform a test of the recovery plan by creating an additional copy of the data on the backup side and start the virtual machines from this copy without connecting them to any network. This situation enables administrators to test recovery plans without interfering with the running production.

To use VMware Site Recovery Manager with an IBM System Storage DS8000 system, you need the storage replication adapter (SRA) software. With VMware and the SRA for DS8000 Version 1.30.11907 or later, the following Copy Services are supported:

A minimum setup for VMware Site Recovery Manager contains the following items:

Figure 30-1 shows an overview of the necessary VMware Site Recovery Manager components with a DS8000.

You can find more detailed information about concepts, and installing, configuring, and using VMware Site Recovery Manager at:

You can download the latest DS8000 storage replication adapter (SRA) software from the following IBM Fix Central website:

Additional information about how to install and configure the SRA software is described in the IBM DS8000 SRA Installation and User’s Guide, which is included with the SRA
software package.

If the environment mandates the use of VMware Site Recovery Manager with IBM Copy Services Manager, then the SRA should be configured for a pre-configured environment. For more information about this configuration, see the IBM DS8000 SRA Installation and Users Guide, SC27-4232.

For further information about VMware Site Recovery Manager, refer to IBM DS8870 and VMware Synergy, REDP-4915.