Devoted to VMware

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager™ 5.0 (SRM) is an extension to VMware vCenter™ that provides disaster recovery capabilities to VMware customers. SRM enables integration with array-based replication, as well as the use of a native VMware vSphere®–based replication engine, discovery and management of replicated datastores, automated migration of inventory
vCenter environments, automated reprotection, and failback of environments

1.SRM Server

Short form for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager™ Server. SRM Server extends vCenter Server to provide disaster recovery capabilities for VMware customers. It enables integration with array-based replication, discovery and management of replicated datastores, and automated migration of VMware inventory from one vCenter server to another.

2. Array based Replication (ABR)
Replication of Virtual Machine that is managed and executed by the storage subsystem itself rather than from inside the virtual machine the VMkernel OR the service console..

3.vSphere Replication
Native software-based replication engine built-in to ESXi 5.0 that can be used to provide replication of virtual machines via SRM.

4.Logical unit number (LUN)
A single SCSI storage device on the SAN that can be mapped to one or more vSphere hosts.

5.Datastore Group
Replicated datastores containing the complete set of Virtual Machines you want to protect via SRM

6.Failover and Fail back
Failover is the event that occurs when the recovery site takes over operation in place of the protected site after the declaration of a disaster. Fail back is the process of restoring system to its original site.

7.Inventory mapping
Mapping between resource pools, networks and VM folders on the protection sit and their destination counterparts on the recover site.

8.Protected Site and recovery site
The protected site is the primary data center. The recovery site is the backup that is used when the primary site is incapacitated by a disaster.

9.Protection Group
A collection of all virtual machines and templates that are failed together during test and recovery.

10.Recovery Plan
The necessary steps to recover protected Virtual Machines in their assigned protection groups according to an order of priority defined in the plan.

11.Storage Replication Adapters (SRA)
Software provided by storage vendors that ensures integration of storage devices with SRM

12.Reprotect
Reversal of direction of replication, and automatic reprotection of protection groups.

13. Datastore
Storage unit of a managed vSphere host

14.Protected VM
A VM that is protected by SRM.

15.Unprotected VM
A VM that is not protected by SRM.

16.Protected site
The site that initially contains the protected VMs.

17.Recovery site
The site to which virtual machines will fail over.

18.Datastore group
Replicated datastores containing complete sets of protected VMs.

19.Placeholder VM
An object found with other VMs in the recovery site vCenter inventory representing a protected site VM that is being replicated to the recovery site. It is represented with an icon showing a lightning bolt.

20.Recovery point objective
The maximum acceptable amount of data that can be lost during a failure, expressed as a time value. For example, an RPO of four hours indicates that up to four hours worth of data loss are acceptable before a return to an operational state.

21.Recovery time objective
The maximum acceptable amount of time that a service or services of a datacenter may be nonfunctional during a failure, expressed as a time value. For example, an RTO of 12 hours indicates it is acceptable that up to 12 hours might pass before a service might be restored.

23.Recovery plan
The complete set of steps needed to recover (or test recovery of) the protected VMs in one or more protection groups.

Most of the above information is taken from VMware SRM 5.0 Evaluators guide & VMware SRM Admin guide

For last couple of months we were evaluating vCenter Operations Manager 5.0.  We were facing couple of issues with it. Thought to share it with the community about this issue.

Internet Explorer running slow/crashes

We have a corporate standard and we have to use Internet Explorer. But few of the widgets in dashboard were running very slow OR it used to crash the IE itself. Earlier, we thought it might be an issue with my computer, so we tried it on my laptop then my  colleagues desktop, they all faced the similar issue.

On the same box, Firefox version 10.0 was working fine. So, we knew, it is a IE issue or something with the plugins. To fix the problem we did the following but that did not help

1. Uninstalled/Disabled the anti-virus

2. Disabled Add-on in IE

3. Compared IE security settings

4. Added vCOPS in trusted zones

3. Tried IE on a Windows 2008 server VM and it worked fine. So we ran RSoP trying to figure out if group policy is causing the issue but that did not help either.

VMware says, they have never seen something like this and it is a problem with our environment – Who is going to say that to upper Management . Finally, we came up with an idea and created ThinApp version of IE 8 to check, if it is a problem with IE or a problem with our environment.

When, we ran ThinApp version of IE and connected to dashboards it worked fine. So, now we know the problem is with our environment. I have a feeling this has to do with security settings/certificates, will let you know about my findings.

Finally, we were able to figure out the problem, the problem is related with McAfee and when we disabled the McAfee from the desktop it worked fine. We had to disable Framework Service and McAfee McShield.

To resolve the issue we configured the McAfee to avoid the scan of the UI URL.

Situation:- 100 CPU based SRM License for our environment.

Problem – VMware changes their Licensing model from CPU based to VM based.

Solution:- Spoke to VMware Licensing support about this issue. They were ready to cover 5 VMs per CPU License what we had purchased. I am not sure, from where they got this number. I think there are so many factors which determines the number of VMs per CPU. Factors like – Hardware, CPU, memory etc…I spoke with VMware about this issue and after showing the numbers of VMs in our environment, they readily agreed to cover more than VMs for per processor purchased.

So, earlier we were going to get almost – 100*5=500 VMs protection

Now, we are going to get 100*12=1200 VMs.

Thanks VMware Support for quick resolution !!!

Magic Thumb™ is a fantastic way to enlarge thumnbail images using a JavaScript lightbox effect.

They have a very good support. I had some issues configuring it and they helped me out.

During the course of my powershell learning, I realised this little one line script can help us to retrieve Hardware version from all the powered-on VMs which are running on old hardware version i.e version 4.

Get-VM | Where-Object {$_.PowerState -eq PoweredOn} | Where-Object {$_.version -lt "v7"}