Vmware SRM 5 Recovery and Failback

Part 10 VMware SRM 5 Recovery and Failback

In Part 10 of this VMware Site Recovery Manager 5 Tutorial Series, we will be running through a full Disaster Recovery to our Secondary Site, followed by a full failback to our Primary Site.

VMware Site Recovery Manager 5 – Recovery

1. Open up VMware Site Recovery Manager 5 and click on Recovery Plans on the left hand side. Click on the Recovery Steps tab.

 

 

2. Click on Recovery at the top right hand side of the screen. You will get the following warning window before the recovery plan is executed. You must tick the box to say you understand that this process will permanently alter the virtual machines and infrastrucure of both the protected and recovery datacenters. You also have 2 options under the recovery site. You can replicate recent changes and then abort if there are any errors OR you can replicate recent changes and continue with the latest synchronization if there are any errors. I will select the first option – Planned Migration. Click Next.

 

 

3. A summary window of the recovery is displayed. Click Start.

 

 

4. The recovery has now completed successfully. This means our servers are now running at the Secondary Site.

 

 

5. If we click on the Site Recovery Manager Virtual Machines tab we can also see that the Recovery is complete. In my recovery plan I have configured Windows 2008 Web 1 to be powered on and Windows 2008 Web 2 to be powered off.

 

 

6. I’ll navigate back to Home – Inventory – Hosts and Clusters and expand my vmvc2.vmlab.local vCenter machine – vmlab secondary datacenter – vmesxi2.vmlab.local ESXi 5 host, Web 1 and Web 2 Recovered. In the screen shot below, you can see that the storage is vmware_datastore which is the datastore sitting on the secondary sites’ SAN. You can also see that the virtual machine is placed into the VM Network Recovered Network.

 

 

7. And just to prove that the Windows 2008 Web 1 server is actually running on the recovered site, here is a screenshot of the console.

 

 

8. If we click on Array Managers on the left hand side followed by the Devices Tab we can see that your snapmirror relationship between the primary sites SAN and the secondary sites SAN is broken off. During the recovery process the Netapp Array Manager quiesces the snapmirror relationship and then breaks the relationship.

 

 

VMware Site Recovery Manager 5 – Failback

9. Now we have run a full disaster recovery, we have got our primary site back online again and it’s time to failback. Click on Recovery Plans on the bottom left side of the page followed by the Recovery Steps tab. We can see the option to Reprotect at the top right hand side.

 

 

10. Click Reprotect. A warning window is displayed explaining that running the reportect on this plan will commit the results of the recovery, and configure protection in the reverse direction. click on the I understand that this operation cannot be undone tick box and click Next.

 

 

11. A Site Recovery Manager Reprotect summary window is displayed. click Start.

 

 

12. The Reprotection starts by configuring the Storage in Reverse Direction. In the background this is actually creating an asynchronous Snapmirror in the reverse direction, from Secondary Site to Primary Site.

 

 

13. The Site Recovery Manager 5 Reprotect steps have now completed. So basically where do we stand now ? The servers are still running on the Secondary Site, however we now have a SAN synchronization in place, synchronizing data from the secondary site to the primary site.

 

 

14. We now want to run the servers back on our primary site, and have the secondary site purely for DR again. Click on Recovery. The Recovery window is displayed. You must tick the box where it says I understand that this process will permanently alter the virtual machines…. and once again I will select Planned Migration under the Recovery Type, as I wish to make sure my changes are synchronized and up to date. Click Next.

 

 

15. The Recovery summary screen is displayed. Click Start.

 

 

16. The Recovery plan is complete and has run successfully with no errors. To reprotect the servers again make sure you re-setup synchronization from your primary site to your secondary site, followed by refreshing the Netapp SRA Adapters within Site Recovery Manager 5

 

 

17. As you can see my 2 virtual machines, Windows 2008 Web 1 and Windows 2008 Web 2 are running back on the primary site.