User guide

Appendix A. Frequently Asked Questions

1. How much CPU resource does the VSR replication software

client consume?

From 1 to 3 percent. This is significantly better than other replication client

software CPU resource consumption.

2. When Reserved Resources Virtual Machine service level

customers create a clone of their replica in a VM, and uses it for

testing or development, are there any license charges from the

customers' software vendors?

Since such customers would be using their development software in two places

simultaneously, IBM's recovery center and their own production environments, the

answer is most likely yes.

According to the IBM Statement of Work (SOW), these charges are solely the

responsibility of the customer. Some customers have global site license

arrangements that include usage in an unlimited number of venues, so it is not

always true that the customer will incur additional license fees.

Talk to your software provider for definitive answers.

3. Does IBM give customers access to vCenter or allow them to

use tools like vMotion?

No, IBM does not give customers access to vMotion or vCenter. These are

components of IBM's service delivery infrastructure, and help ensure resiliency of

the recovery environment.

4. What are the buffer requirements for customers in the event

their communications link goes down?

Each volume in a covered server has a bitmap area for recording regions of disk

that change when a network is unavailable. The equation for bitmap size is 1MB

for each 20GB of source system storage; this acts as scorecard grid which marks

areas to be replicated when the network is restored. Because new data overwrites

old, this area never overflows.

5. Can a customer use VMware's SRM with this solution?

No. The VSR solution offers more functionality than VMware's Site Recovery

Manager (SRM), which is only for virtualized production environments. VSR

protects both physical and virtualized production environments, and enables

seamless management of both through a web portal. The SRM only supports

VMware's ESX hypervisor, while VSR covers all hypervisors, as long as the hosted

Operating System running in the virtual machine is supported by VSR.