Is it possible to use SRM just for SAN failover?

[hccvsphere]

Hello,

We have two separate datacenters that are on the same network and both active. Our ESXi hosts are split between the two and are all active in our cluster. There is only one vCenter appliance. We have two SANs that are replicating and would like to know if SRM can be used in this scenario to automatically make the passive SAN active in VMware should the primary SAN go down. We don't need to change IPs and we don't have dedicated failover ESXi hosts that can sit idle on standby.

Thanks.

[nachogonzalez]

It can work for what you need.
I'm not 100% sure for the automatically part. Every time I did a failover it was planned. 

[ashilkrishnan]

Hi @hccvsphere ,

SRM is configured between two vCenter sites which requires 2 SRM servers (1 each site) and 2 vCenter servers (1 each site).

If you wish to use SRM, you need to have 2 vCenter servers with each containing some ESXi hosts. Protected site would contain ESXi hosts and VMs running production environment and the DR site would contain ESXi hosts in standby mode and would connectivity to secondary storage. Storage and the replicated VMs will be presented to these hosts post failover.

Even with 2 vCenter servers, it does not perform any failover tasks automatically and a manual failover is required.

I hope that helps. Please let me know if you have any questions

[hccvsphere]

Is an Active-Active setup supported? Sounds like we would have to split our single cluster in half and have separate vCenter and SRM servers with for each site instead of one large cluster. If the vCenter servers are separate, is there a way to link them so that we get a single unified management interface?

Regarding SRM in the event of a storage outage, apart from manually initiating the failover, would the datastore provisioning on the failover storage array be automatic?

Thanks.

[ashilkrishnan · Accepted solution]

1. Active-active configuration would be at storage level replication, however for SRM it will always have one site as protected and the other site as DR.

2.For a unified management interface, you can deploy the 2nd vCenter server and choose to join existing SSO domain by pointing it to original vCenter server. It's called as enhanced linked mode(ELM) where you would have both vCenter servers and it's hosts listed under one Web client.

3. Storage array should be compatible and should have a compatible SRA(storage replication adapter) for SRM. During SRM failover, it will automate mounting of datastore's to hosts --> registering VMs from replica datastore's --> Powering them On, etc.

I hope that helps