Varrow Blogs

If you haven’t heard yet, VMware will be changing its licensing model (yeah, again) for some of its vCenter based products like Site Recovery Manager.  At least the per processor licensing model for vSphere will stay the same.  When I first heard about this change my first thought was, WT* is VMware smokin’ over there!  [...]

Joe Kelly and I have submitted to speak at VMworld about RecoverPoint and Site Recovery Manager.  It should be an excellent session based on our experience in the field with the products so it won’t just be a feature overview, but actual information you can take back and use.  Joe is the man on this [...]

As I’m flying back to North Carolina from my one whole day at EMC World I was thinking a bit about the announcements that EMC has made this week.  VPLEX is a very interesting product and I was going over possible use cases in my head. If money was no object, or if you needed [...]

Well here it is, finally.What we all have been dreaming of, what the competitors have been noodling about…Site Recovery Manager 4.0.
Why so much hype, why so much talk? Two words, NFS support..now certainly there are plenty of other features and functionality that are worth mentioning (below), but if any one item could be targeted [...]

Well here’s a real humdinger that has been driving me nutzo for a while now and what do you know…it has to do with SRM and the MirrorView SRA.
Apparently there is an 8 source LUN limit for LUNs within in a consistency group of which you want to take “consistent” snap sessions. Which is [...]

You are probably wondering what I am talking about because the VMware Site Recovery Manager Service in the Windows Services manager runs as “Local System”.

The service account I am talking about is the one that is used by the SRM service to pair the sites together and to connect to vCenter. This is the account [...]

Saw this nugget on the VMware forums that I had just excepted. But I should have guessed if anyone had the answer it was the acclaimed Mike Laverick. When failing over within SRM the replicated LUNs get renamed to snap-xxxxxxx-NAME. To modify this nature the following needs to be reconfigured. Original thread is here. Enjoy!
Locate [...]

So I was playing with SRM in our new Charlotte lab.  I must say, it’s nice having a couple of EMC Celerra NS20s all to yourself.  Anyway…I hit a problem with the SRA when configuring Site Recovery Manager and thought I’d pass along a little note.  The error I got was:
Invalid XML returned from storage [...]

Don’t blink an eye you may miss them. What are they? They are RDM (Raw Device Mapping) helper VM’s and they are new to SRM Update 1. What do they do? The facilitate the handoff of RDM’s in virtual mode to their respective recovered VM. Now I say these little boogers are new to Update [...]

During the course of my experiences with Site Recovery Manager I came across some timeout issues relating to OS Heartbeat delays that make even a successful test recovery look down right error ridden. Specifically it is the portion of your recovery plan that checks for VMware tools heartbeat. This is a configurable value, and by [...]

Proper Datastore design and VM placement upfront can save you and your predecessors from self induced product failure. What do I mean? Listen up…SRM, among other things gives you the luxury of failing over or testing failover for certain applications or VM’s within your environment. By creating protection groups that point to specific VM’s that [...]

Recently I have set up a SRM environment in a virtual lab for testing and performing demos.  I took the opportunity to create a video giving an overview of Site Recovery Manager.  The video walks through a normal configuration and then a test failover.  It’s a simple environment but will give someone a complete picture [...]

Occasionally when implementing SRM we get asked about the Shadow VMs created in the recovery site.  What are they for?  How much space do they require?  Where should they be stored?  Shadow VMs are actually very simple.  They are place holders for the VMs in the protected site.  They consist of three very small files [...]