6.1

Installing Site Recovery Manager to
Use with a Shared Recovery Site 9
With Site Recovery Manager, you can connect multiple protected sites to a single recovery site. The virtual
machines on the protected sites all recover to the same recovery site. This configuration is known as a
shared recovery site, a many-to-one, fan-in, or an N:1 configuration.
In the standard one-to-one Site Recovery Manager configuration, you use Site Recovery Manager to protect
a specific instance of vCenter Server by pairing it with another vCenter Server instance. The first
vCenter Server instance, the protected site, recovers virtual machines to the second vCenter Server instance,
the recovery site.
Another example is to have multiple protected sites that you configure to recover to a single, shared
recovery site. For example, an organization can provide a single recovery site with which multiple protected
sites for remote field offices can connect. Another example for a shared recovery site is for a service provider
that offers business continuity services to multiple customers.
In a shared recovery site configuration, you install one Site Recovery Manager Server instance on each
protected site, each of which connects to a different vCenter Server instance. On the recovery site, you install
multiple Site Recovery Manager Server instances to pair with each Site Recovery Manager Server instance
on the protected sites. All of the Site Recovery Manager Server instances on the shared recovery site connect
to a single vCenter Server instance. Each Site Recovery Manager Server instance in a pair must have the
same Site Recovery Manager extension ID, which you can set when you install
Site Recovery Manager Server. You can consider the owner of a Site Recovery Manager Server pair to be a
customer of the shared recovery site.
You can convert an existing one-to-one configuration of Site Recovery Manager into a shared recovery site
configuration. To convert a one-to-one configuration to a shared recovery site configuration, you deploy
additional Site Recovery Manager Server and vCenter Server instances as protected sites, and pair them
with additional Site Recovery Manager Server instances that all connect to the existing vCenter Server
instance on the recovery site. Each pair of Site Recovery Manager Server instances in the shared recovery
site configuration must use a different Site Recovery Manager extension ID. For example, if you installed a
one-to-one configuration that uses the default Site Recovery Manager extension ID, you must deploy all
subsequent Site Recovery Manager Server pairs with different custom extension IDs.
You can use either array-based replication or vSphere Replication or a combination of both when you
configure Site Recovery Manager Server to use a shared recovery site.
In addition to the shared recovery site configuration, Site Recovery Manager also allows and supports
shared protected site (one-to-many, fan-out, or 1:N) and many-to-many (N:N) configurations.
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