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5 Disaster Recovery with Dell PS Series SANs and VMware vSphere Site Recovery Manager | TR1073
1 Introduction
Historically, disaster recovery (DR) solutions have been difficult and costly to implement. DR has been a pain
point for many IT administrators, having to maintain consistency across duplicate hardware in various
locations, documenting and maintaining detailed run books, reacting to changes in the environment, and
scheduling testing that is classically disruptive to the production environment.
VMware SRM works with the Dell PS Series built-in replication to make disaster recovery rapid, manageable,
reliable and affordable. SRM is an add-on feature to vCenter on both the primary and the recovery site. SRM
and vCenter at Site A (the Production Site) coordinate with SRM and vCenter residing at Site B (the DR Site)
to simplify and automate disaster recovery. SRM allows for automated testing of DR plans, in advance of a
disaster, as well as managing the failover and recovery in the event of a real disaster. SRM facilitates the
process of bringing an entire virtual environment from one location to another. SRM centralizes the process of
configuring a DR plan run book and allows for the testing of the plan without causing any impact to the
production environment.
This paper discusses the installation and configuration of SRM with the Dell PS Series arrays. It covers setup,
testing, failover, failback and troubleshooting. This document is designed to be used in conjunction with the
SRM Administration Guide and assumes a prior knowledge of VMware vSphere and vCenter environments.