Site Recovery Manager provides a solution for automating the recovery and execution of a disaster recovery plan in the event of a disaster in a data center. When a catastrophe occurs, components in the Management Pod must be available to recover and continue the healthy operations of the NFV-based services.
To ensure robust business continuity and disaster recovery, network connectivity between the protected and recovery sites is required, with enough bandwidth capacity to replicate the management components by using vSphere Replication. Each site must have an instance of vCenter Server that governs the Management Pod and its ESXi hosts, and a Site Recovery Manager server and vSphere Replication appliance to orchestrate the disaster recovery workflows and replicate content across the sites. The protected site provides business critical services, while the recovery site is an alternative infrastructure on which services are recovered in the event of a disaster.
Inventory Mappings
Elements in the vCenter Server inventory list can be mapped from the protected site to their vCenter Server inventory counterparts on the recovery site. Such elements include VM folders, clusters or resource pools, and networks. All items within a single data center on the protected site must map to a single data center on the recovery site.
These inventory mapping details are used across both the protected and recovery sites:
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Resource mapping maps cluster objects on the protected site to cluster objects on the recovery site.
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Folder mapping maps the folder structures like data centers or VM folders on the protected site to folder structures on the recovery site.
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Network mapping maps the management networks on the protected site to management networks on the recovery site.
Protection Groups
A protection group is a group of management components at the protected site that can failover together to the recovery site during testing and recovery. All protected management components are placed within a single protection group.
Recovery Plans
Recovery plans are the run books that are associated with a disaster recovery scenario. A recovery plan determines which management components are started, what needs to be powered down, which scripts to run, the startup order, and the overall automated execution of the failover.
A complete site failure is the only scenario that invokes a disaster recovery. There is no requirement for recovery plans to handle planned migrations or to move a single failed application within the management cluster. A single recovery plan is created for the automated failover of the primary site, and the placement of management components into priority groups ensures the correct startup order.
