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31 Disaster Recovery with Dell PS Series SANs and VMware vSphere Site Recovery Manager | TR1073
9 Recovery
In case of a full site failure, a site migration or simply wanting to fail over individual protection groups, running
the recovery plan follows a slightly different process. First, SRM tries to communicate with the protected site
vCenter Server. If it can, SRM shuts down any VMs on the protected site to make sure they are not online
with both sites. It also takes the original protected datastores offline. When running the recovery plan, instead
of making a clone of the replicas on the DR array, the replicas are promoted but with the ability to be later
demoted. Once all the replicas are promoted, SRM prompts vCenter to rescan all of the storage adapters and
bring the promoted volumes online as storage.
Next, SRM re-registers the recovery VMs to point to the newly promoted volumes. Unlike a test, the network
configuration is changed to match the recovery settings so the test isolated vSwitch will not be created. Each
of the VMs power on based on their priority level and the rest of the recovery plan runs. Once the entire
recovery plan is complete, the protected site’s virtual environment is in production on the recovery site.
The replicas that were promoted are not fully promoted volumes, because they retain the ability to be
demoted in order to utilize the fast failback procedure on the group. Because the promotion is not permanent,
there are a few actions that cannot be done on the volume, such as renaming it or resizing it. At any point you
can make the promotion of the volume permanent, however, this will impact SRM's ability to reprotect and
failback that volume.
1. To begin a recovery process, click Recovery Plans, select a recovery plan and click Run Recovery
Plan. A planned migration or disaster recovery is an executive decision and should not be invoked
without planning and thought. SRM will verify that this is the option you wish to take by requiring the
administrator to check the box acknowledging that the process will change the environment. You can
select between two types of recovery processes:
Planned Migration: Used when migrate between datacenters. The plan will stop on any failure and
not complete the site migration. It will also try to take one last replication to obtain all of the latest
changes.
Disaster Recovery: Used when the protected site is unavailable or in the event of a true disaster.
The plan will attempt to synchronize and power down VMs on the protected site but if there are any
errors it will continue moving forward with the plan.
2. Acknowledge the warning, select the recovery type and click Next to begin the failover process.