VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is a disaster recovery automation software that provides policy-based management, non-disruptive testing, and automated orchestration. To protect your vRealize Network Insight, SRM automates every aspect of executing a disaster recovery plan to accelerate recovery and eliminate the risks involved when using a manual process. vRealize Network Insight supports SRM version 8.2 and newer versions.

For information about installing, upgrading, and configuring SRM, see VMware Site Recovery Manager Documentation.

The prerequisites for the disaster recovery operation for vRealize Network Insight are as follows:
  • Ensure that you have installed and configured vSphere Replication.
  • SRM should be deployed and configured on both the protected and the recovery sites.
  • Ensure that the site pairing is configured properly from within the SRM UI before proceeding with the creation of the recovery plan and other components.
  • VMware vSphere Replication should be enabled for each of the protected nodes of the vRealize Network Insight setup in context. While enabling VMware vSphere Replication, provide sufficient RPO considering the vRealize Network Insight node size & the usage so that minimum data loss is expected to incur during a disaster. For more information on replication, see VMware vSphere Replication Documentation.
  • Ensure that you create a separate protection group for vRealize Network Insight. For small and non-distributed deployments, ensure that all the VMs are in the same protection group. For distributed deployments, it is recommended that you place all the platforms in a single protection group so that it is easy to recover. You can place the collectors in different protection groups.
  • Create a recovery plan and add the protection groups containing vRealize Network Insight VMs to this plan. Ensure that the protection group containing the platform nodes get the higher precedence. In the recovery plan, ensure that the primary platform node is placed in a higher priority group than the other platform nodes.
  • Currently, any type of IPv4 customization with SRM is not supported

It is recommended that you migrate or recover vRealize Network Insight VMs to an identical network configuration. Also as per the SRM recommendation, you can perform test run periodically to ensure the existing plan works with underlying infrastructure and the configured RPO limit.

  • Migrate or recover vRealize Network Insight VMs to an identical network configuration.

    If the recovery site is configured to have the same network configuration as the protected site and a mapping is created between the identical networks, configure all replicated vRealize Network Insight virtual machines to be started with the same IPs, because these VMs are the protected nodes. The recovered system will become operational after the planned migration or disaster recovery has finished successfully.

  • Do not specify any IP customization for a recovery plan when the recovery site does not have the same network as that of the protected site. In this scenario, SRM is used for the recovery of the appliance VMs. For configuring network post recovery, manually assign the network settings as follows:
  1. Run change-network-settings command on all platforms to change the IP.
    Note: Ensure that the platform VM reboots successfully before you run the next command.
  2. Run update-IP-change command on all the nodes.

    For example, in a 3-node cluster, to update IP of platform1 from IP1 to IP2, run the update-IP-change command on platform2 and platform3 with IP1 and IP2 as the arguments. To update IP of platform2, run the update-IP-change command on platform1 and platform3.

  3. Run finalize-IP-change command on platform1.
  4. Run the show-connectivity-status command on all the collectors and search for Platform_VM_IP/URL to identify the associated platform nodes.
  5. Run vrni-proxy set-platform –-ip-or-fqdn platform-newIP on all collectors.

    For example, if the CollectorA is associated to platform2, run vrni-proxy set-platform –-ip-or-fqdn platform2-newIP.

  6. Check the service status. If some of the services on the platform nodes are not running, reboot the nodes in the recommended order.
Note: For more information on the commands mentioned above, see vRealize Network Insight Command Line Reference Guide.