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 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 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 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.
Site Recovery Manager also supports shared protected site (one-to-many, fan-out, or 1:N) and many-to-many (N:N) configurations.
Converting One-to-One Site Recovery Manager Configuration 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.
Using Site Recovery Manager with Multiple Protected Sites and a Shared Recovery Site
An organization has two field offices and a head office. Each of the field offices is a protected site. The head office acts as the recovery site for both of the field offices. Each field office has a Site Recovery Manager Server instance and a vCenter Server instance. The head office has two Site Recovery Manager Server instances, each of which is paired with a Site Recovery Manager Server instance in one of the field offices. Both of the Site Recovery Manager Server instances at the head office extend a single vCenter Server instance.
- Field office 1
- Site Recovery Manager Server A
- vCenter Server A
- Field office 2
- Site Recovery Manager Server B
- vCenter Server B
- Head office
- Site Recovery Manager Server C, that is paired with Site Recovery Manager Server A
- Site Recovery Manager Server D, that is paired with Site Recovery Manager Server B
- vCenter Server C, that is extended by Site Recovery Manager Server C and Site Recovery Manager Server D
