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4 Disaster Recovery with Dell PS Series SANs and VMware vSphere Site Recovery Manager | TR1073
Executive summary
The virtual datacenter introduces new challenges and techniques for disaster recovery. This paper details the
installation and configuration of Dell™ PS Series storage with VMware® vCenter Site Recovery Manager to
help make disaster recovery an automated and manageable part of your virtual environment.
Data Protection and Disaster Recovery (DP/DR) is foremost in the minds of datacenter administrators.
Virtualization adds increased flexibility and techniques when looking at protection schemes for the
environment. Because VMware encapsulates entire servers into a series of files that make up the virtual
machine; administrators can now take advantage of block storage based techniques such as clones,
snapshots and replicas to protect these servers. Dell PS Series arrays offer built-in replication to transfer
data, and therefore the virtual machines, from one location to another. Integration software is also provided
that combines with VMware vSphere
®
. VMware vCenter
®
Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is a suite of tools
that help automate and test disaster recovery plans and depends on the PS Series replication to work. By
combining these two platforms, administrators now have a manageable way to not only configure, automate,
and test disaster recovery plans, but the means to easily run them in the case of a disaster.
This paper details the installation and configuration of VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager software. As
part of this setup, the Dell storage adapter plug-in, the Storage Replication Adapter (SRA), is needed to
enable communication from VMware vCenter to the PS Series storage. In addition to SRM configuration and
the storage adapter, this document details how to configure replication between sites and how to setup and
test a recovery plan. The last section has instructions for performing a full site failover and how to failback
when the problems are resolved.