6.1

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NOTE: A virtual machine dependency is ignored if the virtual machines are not in the same
priority group.
Recommendation: Limit the use of dependencies where possible to minimize the amount of
time required to recover virtual machines.
Shutdown Actions
Shutdown actions apply to the protected virtual machines at the protected site during the run
of a recovery plan. Shutdown actions are not used during the test of a recovery plan. By default,
Site Recovery Manager will issue a guest OS shutdown, which requires VMware Tools and there
is a time limit of five minutes. The time limit can be modified. If the guest OS shutdown fails and
the time limit is reached, the virtual machine is powered off. Shutting down and powering off
the protected virtual machines at the protected site when running a recovery plan is important
for a few reasons:
•
Quiesces the guest OS and applications before the final storage synchronization occurs
•
Avoids the potential conflict of having virtual machines with duplicate network
configurations (hostname, IP addresses) on the same network
Optionally, the shutdown action can be changed to simply power off virtual machines. Powering
off virtual machines does not shut them down gracefully, but this option can reduce recovery
times in situations where the protected site and recovery site maintain network connectivity
during the run (not test) of a recovery plan. An example of this is a disaster avoidance scenario.
Recommendation: In most cases, minimizing risk and data loss are higher priorities than
recovery time. Keep the default Shutdown Action setting of “Shutdown guest OS before power
off” to properly quiesce the guest OS and applications, where possible, during a planned
migration and disaster recovery.
Startup Actions
A startup action applies to a virtual machine that is recovered by Site Recovery Manager.
Powering on a virtual machine after it is recovered is the default setting and this is typically not
changed. In some cases, it might be desirable to recover a virtual machine, but leave it powered
off. Startup actions are applied when a recovery plan is tested or run.
With the default setting of “Power on”, it is possible to configure the amount of time Site
Recovery Manager waits for VMware Tools heartbeats before issuing an error message. VMware
Tools heartbeats are used to validate a virtual machine started successfully. The default timeout
value is five minutes. Changing the timeout value for this setting might be useful for virtual
machines that take longer to start up. For example, if a virtual machine takes six minutes to fully
boot, an error message would be produced even though the virtual machine is recovered
without issue. Changing the timeout value to more than six minutes would eliminate this “false
positive” error message.
Another configurable option in this section is the delay before running a post power on step,
which will be covered next. A common example of a post power on step is running a script in
the guest OS of a virtual machine. A delay might be needed to provide adequate time for a
system service to start before running a script.