Creating Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Protection Groups and Recovery Plans
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Creating Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Protection Groups and Recovery Plans

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Article ID: 398861

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Updated On:

Products

VMware Site Recovery Manager 8.x VMware Live Recovery

Issue/Introduction

Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is a powerful orchestration tool designed to manage the recovery of virtual machine compute nodes across sites. It supports two primary methods for replicating data between source and disaster recovery sites:

  • vSphere Replication
  • Array Based Replication

When creating Protection Groups and Recovery Plans within SRM, it is important to keep vSphere Replication VMs separate from Array Based Replication VMs, and to group VMs by their storage vendor to ensure proper management and recovery workflows. This guide provides detailed procedures for creating Protection Groups and Recovery Plans using both replication methods, helping administrators effectively protect and recover their virtual environments.

Environment

  • VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 8.x and 9.x
  • VMware Live Recovery

Cause

The cause for issues related to creating Protection Groups and Recovery Plans in Site Recovery Manager often stems from mixing different replication types or storage vendors within the same Protection Groups and Recovery Plans. Specifically, combining vSphere Replication VMs with Array Based Replication VMs, or grouping VMs from different storage vendors together, can lead to:

  • Configuration conflicts
  • Recovery failures

Proper segregation according to replication method and storage vendor is necessary to ensure successful replication and recovery operations.

Resolution

Procedure

Replicate files from source site to disaster recovery site (DR) or target site.

  1. Log in to the vSphere Client.
  2. On the home page, click Site Recovery and click Open Site Recovery.
  3. On the Site Recovery home page, select a site pair and click View Details.
  4. Click the Replications tab, select Outgoing or Incoming, and click the Create new replication icon.
  5. In the Replications tab > Outgoing, Click NEW.
  6. Accept the automatic assignment of a vSphere Replication server or select a particular server on the target site and click Next.
    Note: If more than one vSphere Replication Server (such as Add-Ons), select manually and select the vSphere Replication Server on the target site and click Next.
  7. On the Virtual machines page of the Configure Replication wizard, select the virtual machines you want to replicate and click Next.

  8. On the Target datastore page, select a datastore on which to replicate files. and click Next.

    Notes: 

  • When replicating multiple virtual machines, you can configure a different target datastore for each virtual machine.
  • (Optional) Select the Select seeds check box. Replication seeds can reduce the network traffic during the initial full synchronization, but unintended use of replication seeds might lead to data loss.
  • (Optional) On the Select seed page, review the suggested replication seeds and change them if necessary.
  • You can select seed files for each virtual machine disk and search for seeds by using the drop-down menu and clicking Browse. The replica files for the disk are written in the seeds file directory.
  1. Select The selected seeds are correct check box and click Next
    (Optional) Select or deselect the Auto-include new disks in replication check box. Keep the check box selected to automatically include new disks in the replication, with the same replication configuration as the source virtual machine.

Disk format for the automatically included disks is determined the following way:

  • If all replicated disks use the Same as source format, the Same as source format is applied to the automatically included disks. If that is not the case, but all replicated disks use the same format, for example Thin provision, the same format (Thin provision) is applied to the automatically included disks. If all replicated disks use different formats, the Same as source format is applied to the automatically included disks.
  • If you activate the Configure datastore per disk view, you can activate or deactivate the automatic replication of new disks by toggling the New Hard disk switch.

  1. On the Replication settings page, use the RPO slider to set the acceptable period for which data can be lost if a site failure occurs. The available RPO range is from 5 minutes to 24 hours.
    (Optional) To save multiple replication instances that can be converted to snapshots of the source virtual machine during recovery, select Enable point in time instances and adjust the number of instances to keep.
    Note: You can keep up to 24 instances for a virtual machine. For example, if you configure vSphere Replication to keep 6 replication instances per day, the maximum number of days you can set is four days.
    The number of replication instances that vSphere Replication keeps depends on the configured retention policy, but also requires that the RPO period is short enough for these instances to be created. Because vSphere Replication does not verify whether the RPO settings creates enough instances to keep, and does not display a warning message if the instances are not enough, you must ensure that you set vSphere Replication to create the instances that you want to keep. For example, if you set vSphere Replication to keep six replication instances per day, the RPO period must not exceed four hours, so that vSphere Replication can create six instances in 24 hours.

    (Optional) Activate quiescing for the guest operating system of the source virtual machine.
    Note: Quiescing options are available only for virtual machines that support quiescing. vSphere Replication does not support VSS quiescing on vVOL.
    (Optional) Select Enable network compression for VR data.
    Compressing the replication data that is transferred through the network saves network bandwidth and might help reduce the amount of buffer memory used on the vSphere Replication server. However, compressing and decompressing data requires more CPU resources on both the source site and the server that manages the target datastore.
    (Optional) Activate the network encryption of the replication traffic.
    If you configure a replication of an encrypted VM, this option is automatically turned on and cannot be deactivated.

  1. On the Protection group page the options are Add to existing, Add to new, Do not add to protection group now

Optional Add to a new protection group. input the name for Protection group name: and click Next.

  1. On the Recovery plan page the options are Add to existing, Add to new, Do not add to recovery plan now.

  1. On the Ready to complete page, review the replication settings, and click Finish.

Live Recovery Manager

Procedure

  1. In the vSphere Client, click Site Recovery > Open Site Recovery.
  2. On the Site Recovery home tab, select a site pair, and click View Details.
  3. Click the Protection Groups tab, and click New to create a protection group.
  4. On the Name and direction page, enter a name and description for the protection group, select a direction, and click Next.
  5. On the Protection group type pane, select Individual VMs (vSphere Replication), and click Next.

  1. Select virtual machines from the list to add to the protection group and click Next.
    Note: Only virtual machines that you configured for vSphere Replication and that are not already in a protection group appear in the list.
  2. On the Recovery plan page, you can optionally add the protection group to a recovery plan.

  1. Review your settings and click Finish.

Array Based Replication

Array-Based Replication Protection Groups and Datastore Groups requires the VM's to be storage vMotion to the replicated datastore.

Procedure

For more information for creating Array-Base Replication Protection Groups SRM 8.8 to 9.0, see Add and Remove Datastore Groups or Virtual Machines to or from a Protection Group.

  1. In the vSphere Client, click Site Recovery > Open Site Recovery.
  2. On the Site Recovery home tab, select a site pair, and click View Details.
  3. Click the Protection Groups tab, and click New to create a protection group.
  4. On the Name and direction page, enter a name and description for the protection group, select a direction, and click Next.
  5. On the Protection group type pane, select Datastore groups (array-based replication), select an array pair, and click Next.

  1. Select datastore groups to add to the protection group and click Next.
    Note: When you select a datastore group, the virtual machines that the group contains appear in the Virtual machines table.
  2. On the Recovery plan page, you can optionally add the protection group to a recovery plan.

  1. Review your settings and click Finish.
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