Users Guide

vSphere Site Recovery Manager
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) provides an automated disaster recovery solution for vSphere virtualized datacenters. When
integrated with Dell Storage Center, Replays are used by SRM to register and power on virtual machines during the recovery process at the
remote site and as such Replays eectively represent the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for virtual machines.
NOTE: When creating Replay Manager job schedules, RPO and expiration should always be considered.
SRM can leverage Replays created by Replay Manager, however, the following points should be considered to ensure that the disaster
recovery design meets expectations during testing or execution of the recovery plan:
• Replays created by Replay Manager will contain vSphere snapshots. By default, when SRM recovers these virtual machines, they will
still be in a vSphere snapshot state.
• The application and data consistency through VSS is frozen in the read-only snapshot.
• Any data written after the snapshot occurred and before the volume Replay was created will not be application or data consistent.
Rather, the data will be crash consistent.
• If the application needs to be recovered with VSS consistency, revert to the previous vSphere snapshot and then delete the vSphere
snapshot using the vSphere Client. This must be done before the virtual machine is powered on automatically by SRM or manually
through human intervention.
• If application or data consistency is not required for disaster recovery purposes, the virtual machines at the recovery site may be
immediately powered on in a vSphere snapshot state. However, it is not advisable to allow virtual machines to continue running for
extended periods of time in a snapshot state. The vSphere snapshots for each virtual machine should be committed and deleted as
soon as possible.
Related link
Restore Data with VSS Consistency
Storage vMotion
vSphere enables the ability of a virtual machine to migrate between hosts using vMotion and between storage using Storage vMotion.
vMotion will not create any issues for Replay Manager as long as all vSphere hosts are zoned and mapped to the necessary volumes,
however, there are some usage considerations.
CAUTION
: Do not use the VMware Datastores backup extension if you are using Storage vMotion. Storage vMotion will cause a
Replay Manager job to fail if the VMware Datastores backup extension was used for the job.
Replay Manager jobs using the VMware Virtual Machines backup extension are not impacted by Storage vMotion as long as the Storage
vMotion destination is a Storage Center congured in Replay Manager. Every time a Replay Manager job using this extension is run, Replay
Manager will update the virtual machine's le locations as necessary before performing the job. The Replay Manager job will be updated
accordingly and no action will be required of the administrator.
Replay Manager Best Practices
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