Whitepaper - VMware cCenter

Posted by Duncan Epping on August 12, 2009

What you should know about Site Recovery Manager

Yesterday two really valuable articles were released. Both articles relate to Site Recovery Manager(SRM) which happens to be one of my focus areas.

The first article is an official VMware Whitepaper "VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Performance and Best Practices". This white-paper describes how to optimize your SRM environment to decrease your RTO. In the end that is what SRM is all about, decreasing your downtime if and when disaster strikes. I will quote one recommendation just to give you an idea of that this white-paper is all about. I highly recommend reading the full document for all the details.

http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10057

If VMware DRS is not enabled on a cluster, then it is a good practice to manually distribute placeholder virtual machines evenly across hosts. This will help in distributing the load across hosts when recovered virtual machines are powered on and will in turn improve performance and recovery time. To do this, drag and drop the placeholder virtual machines across desired hosts.

Coincidentally at the same day I published a SRM FAQ. This FAQ was part of a reference guide written by VMware's BCDR Specialist System Engineer Michael White. Michael was so kind to share it with me and the rest of the world via Yellow-Bricks.com. This FAQ will be updated on a regular base and if you have any questions or comments don't hesitate to leave a comment on my blog.

While we are on the subject of SRM I would like to draw your attention to these excellent VMworld sessions you should definitely attend if BC-DR is one of your focus areas:

BC2260 Automated Disaster Recovery for Branch Offices using SRM and vSphere 4
BC3301 DR Architecture Design Workshop with SRM
BC3421 SRM Architecture & Features: The Road Ahead
DV2181 Leveraging SRM with VMware View - Lessons Learned
SPL16 VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Basic Install & Config

http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2009/08/what-you-should-know-about-site-recovery-manager.html