This book covers the use of vSphere Replication and VMware Site Recovery Manager to make your vSphere environment recoverable in the event of a disaster. All the concepts and tasks covered in this book are for vSphere Replication 6.1 and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 6.1.
Chapter 1, Installing and Configuring vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 6.1, 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, guides you through the steps required to deploy vSphere Replication Appliances and vSphere Replication Servers.
Chapter 5, Configuring and Using vSphere Replication 6.1, teaches you how to add target sites and enable replication on virtual machines and recover them. It also teaches you how to configure vCenter SRM to leverage the vSphere Replication engine.
Chapter 6, Using vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) to Automate SRM and vSphere Replication, guides you through the process of deploying and configuring vRealize Orchestrator. It also teaches you how to install vRO plugins for SRM and vSphere Replication and has instructions which will help you to locate SRM and vSphere replication logs and use them for troubleshooting issues.
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 a VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion and a Virtual Storage Appliance such as HP Store Virtual (LeftHand networks). You could get a trial license for HP Store Virtual by registering for one at HP's website. For the suggested lab architecture the ESXi hosts, vCenter Servers, vSphere Replication Appliances, SRM Servers, and the storage nodes will be virtual machines that are hosted using the VMware Workstation/Fusion.
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 text styles 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: "Every virtual machine will have a swap file (.vswp)".
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
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, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "The Ready to complete screen will summarize the settings; review them and click on Finish to initiate the test."
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