This book covers the use of vSphere Replication and VMware Site Recovery Manager for making your vSphere environment recoverable in the event of a disaster. All the concepts and tasks covered in this book are for vSphere Replication 5.5 and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.5.
Chapter 1, Installing and Configuring vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.5, introduces you to the architecture of SRM and also guides you through the process of installing and configuring SRM to leverage array-based replication.
Chapter 2, Creating Protection Groups and Recovery Plans, teaches you how to configure protection for virtual machines by creating Protection Groups and creating an orchestrated runbook with the help of Recovery Plans.
Chapter 3, Testing and Performing a Failover and Failback, teaches you how to test the recovery plans that were created and also perform a Planned Migration, a Failover, and a Failback using them.
Chapter 4, Deploying vSphere Replication 5.5, guides you through the steps required in deploying vSphere Replication Appliances and vSphere Replication Servers.
Chapter 5, Configuring and Using vSphere Replication 5.5, teaches you how to add target sites and enable replication on virtual machines and recover them. It will also teach you to configure vCenter SRM to leverage vSphere Replication engine.
If you were to follow along with each chapter by practicing the tasks in a lab, then you would need two ESXi hosts, two vCenter Servers, two SRM instances, and two storage array nodes with replication configured between them. This might sound like a lot of hardware, but all you need is VMware Workstation 9.x or 10.x and a Virtual Storage Appliance such as HP Store Virtual 9500 (LeftHand networks). You could get a trial license for HP Store Virtual by registering for one at HP's website. The ESXi hosts, vCenter Servers, vSphere Replication Appliances, SRM Servers, and the storage nodes would be virtual machines that are hosted using VMware Workstation.
This book is a guide for anyone who is keen on using vSphere Replication or vCenter Site Recovery Manager as a disaster recovery solution. This is an excellent handbook for solution architects, administrators, on-field engineers, and support professionals. Although the book assumes that the reader has some basic knowledge of data center virtualization using VMware vSphere, it can still be a very good reference for anyone who is new to virtualization.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "For instance, if you were protecting the SQL Server VMs, then you might name the protection group as SQL Server Protection Group."
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
For instance, to run a batch script in D:\demoscript.bat, include the following command:
c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe /c d:\demoscript.bat
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on Recovery Plans on the left pane."
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