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Site Recovery Manager configuration
33 Dell EMC SC Series: VMware Site Recovery Manager Best Practices | 2007-M-BP-V
Select Discover Devices as shown on the following screen to invoke an SRA query to the DSM Data
Collector to obtain the newest array-based replicated device information.
6.4 Creating protection groups
If not completed already, create a small VMFS datastore at the disaster recovery site as a placeholder for VM
configuration files. For each virtual machine protected, SRM creates a shadow VM at the opposite site serving
as a placeholder for required processor, memory, and network capacity in a disaster recovery or planned
migration scenario.
Although this datastore only needs to be large enough to hold the configuration files for all the recoverable
virtual machines, creating a standard-sized 500 GB datastore will suffice. SC Series Dynamic Capacity thinly
provisions the volume making this a suitable standard which is space efficient.
In most cases, only one placeholder datastore per site is required because the disaster recovery and
migration processes unregister and reregister the recovered virtual machine with the .vmx file on the
recovered volume. The placeholder volume does not need to be replicated because VMware SRM only
places transient data on this volume that can be easily regenerated within the UI.
With the placeholder datastore ready, protection groups can be created. Replicated or Live Volume stretched
storage datastore volumes are the foundation that protection groups are built upon. A protection group is
effective immediately after being created. Once a VM is protected, it is essentially pinned to the datastore (or
datastores) where the .vmx and .vmdk files reside. Manually moving files that belong to a virtual machine off
of a datastore is not supported with SRM; the VM will not be protected or replicated from its original datastore
or datastores. Automated Storage DRS (SDRS) and VMware Storage vMotion
®
can be sparingly used with
SRM-protected VMs if certain guidelines are followed. See the VMware Site Recovery Manager
Administration Guide. Dell Storage SC Series arrays offer dynamic block architecture and Data Progression