Hello, I'm looking to use SRM v5 in an off site solution for our customer. The SAN used is an HP P4500, each physical site is its own management group, each management group contains a single two node cluster. I've got all the baseline configurations done, remote copy schedules built and tested against SRM's test recovery plans. I've got each site with its own local vCenter as a VM, we're running in linked mode. SRM is installed local to the vCenter VM at each site as well. The vCenter/SRM VM is stored in one of the replicated LUNs. The WAN is 10Mbps.
The remote copy/scheduling and SRMs testing plans all go off without any glitches but when I ran an actual DR test and then chose to fail back I ran into the problem of SRM wanting to power down the original protected VMs, that is an issue since in doing so SRM at the DR site powers down the SRM/vCenter at the primary site. So, being that I use vCenter at SRM in the same VM and we want to protect those systems, what are my options? First, I know this might not be best practice (running vCenter and SRM in the same VM) but lets assume that configuration needs to stay as is. Also, we are looking to avoid a re-build the of primary site's vCenter/SRM in the event of an actual disaster.
The one option I came up with but have yet to test would be to keep the vCenter/SRM VM on its own replicated LUN, but not allow SRM to recover or manage this LUN. In the event of a DR, the primary site's vCenter/SRM install is still protected and when it comes time to fail back the only down side I can see is that we first need to manually reverse replication on the LUN containing the primary site vCenter and the manually re-attach/power on the VM back at the primary site. This obviously would all need to happen prior to SRM's recovery plan starting.
Any advice or feedback would be appreciated.
Thanks!