VMware Site Recovery for VMware Cloud FAQ

Introduction and General Information

What is the VMware Site Recovery Service?

VMware Site Recovery brings trusted replication, orchestration, and automation technologies to VMware Cloud to protect applications in the event of site failures. The service is built on an industry-leading recovery plan automation solution that includes VMware Site Recovery Manager™ and native hypervisor-based replication via VMware vSphere® Replication™. The service provides an end-to-end disaster recovery solution that can help reduce the requirements for a secondary recovery site, accelerate time-to-protection, and simplify disaster recovery operations.

Where is VMware Site Recovery available today?

The service is available in all regions where VMware Cloud on AWS is available, including AWS GovCloud (US) region.

What protection configurations are supported?

VMware Site Recovery can protect:

  • Workloads running in an on-premises data center to a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC
  • Workloads running on a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC to an on-premises data center
  • Between different VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs
What are the differences between VMware Site Recovery and Site Recovery Manager?

Site Recovery Manager is software that can be installed and managed by customers and used on-premises as well as with hyperscalers like Azure VMware Solutions, Google Cloud VMware Engine and Oracle VMware Solution.

VMware Site Recovery is a service from VMware. It is supported on both VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware Cloud on Dell. It is managed and maintained by VMware and available for use as a service by customers.

What is the minimum version of vCenter required at the paired on-premises datacenter to support VMware Site Recovery?

The version of vCenter required at the paired on-premises datacenter to support VMware Site Recovery depends on the version of Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication deployed on the paired on-premises datacenter. VMware Product Interoperability Matrices between VMware vCenter Server and Site Recovery Manager here can be used to determine the minimum version of vCenter needed based on the version of Site Recovery Manager deployed on the paired on-premises datacenter. Similarly, VMware Product Interoperability Matrices between VMware vCenter Server and vSphere Replication here can be used to determine the minimum vCenter needed based on the version of vSphere Replication deployed on the paired on-premises datacenter. Note that Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication on the paired on-premises data center can have a minimum of N-1 version of the Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication components of VMware Site Recovery on VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC

Does the on-premises version of vSphere, vCenter and Site Recovery Manager have to match those deployed in VMware Cloud?

No. VMware Site Recovery was designed to provide flexibility in the versions of the components deployed by a customer in their on-premises datacenter and those deployed and managed by VMware in VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware Site Recovery is compatible with the N-1 version of Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication on the paired on-premises datacenter. For example, if the current version of VMware Site Recovery is 8.6, the supported versions for Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication on the paired on-premises datacenter are 8.5 and later.

Pricing and Licensing

How is VMware Site Recovery service packaged and priced?

VMware Site Recovery is a separate, add-on service that is priced and charged separately from VMware Cloud on AWS. Please visit the pricing page for the latest information on pricing. The list price of VMware Site Recovery includes the Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication components for both the VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC instance and the on-premises data center. The pricing also includes support.

Can I apply existing VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) licenses to enable VMware Site Recovery?

No, VMware Site Recovery service is a separately priced and licensed solution. Please visit the pricing page for the latest information on pricing.

Are there any additional charges to use VMware Site Recovery in a multi-site configuration?

There are no additional charges to use VMware Site Recovery in a multi-site configuration such as fan-in, fan-out or other complex topologies. The standard pricing applies to all of the virtual machines you protect using VMware Site Recovery.

Are vCenter Server licenses required for both the protected and recovery sites?

Yes, Site Recovery Manager requires two active and licensed vCenter Server instances, one at each site (protected and recovery). The vCenter license for the VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC is provided as part of the service.

After failover, what are the license requirements for failback?

VMware Site Recovery is billed per replicated VM, regardless of the direction. The pricing for failback is the same as failover.

What license keys does VMware Site Recovery use?

VMware Site Recovery uses a special license key that is added and managed by the service. No user involvement is required.

Key Features

Which replication software is supported with VMware Site Recovery?

VMware Site Recovery currently supports/utilizes vSphere Replication and Enhanced Replication for VMware Site Recovery (currently IA).

What components are required to support using Enhanced Replication for VMware Site Recovery?

Enhanced Replication for VMware Site Recovery requires Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication versions 8.7 at both the source and target sites. Upgrades of all components within the VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC are managed and handled by VMware. Next-generation vSphere Replication also requires SDDC version 1.22 or higher. 

Can VMware Site Recovery protect workloads on physical servers?

Site Recovery Manager orchestrates the recovery process for virtual machines. In cases where some workloads run on physical servers with a separate disaster recovery solution, Site Recovery Manager can coordinate the recovery process by allowing users to create custom scripts that ensure that workloads are restored in the appropriate order.

Does VMware Site Recovery provide automated failback?

Yes, VMware Site Recovery provides automated failback. The first step is to perform a “reprotect” of the virtual machines from the failover site to the original production site. This involves coordinating the reversal of replication to the original site and mapping virtual machines back to their original virtual machine folders, virtual switches, and resource pools. The second step is to execute the planned migration back to the original site, using the original recovery plan executed in the reverse direction.

What is the difference between planned migration and DR failover?

Planned migration and DR failover both leverage the same recovery plans. DR failover is used in the event of a disaster and is designed to recover virtual machines at the failover site quickly. Planned migration is used for preventive failovers or routine migrations. Planned migration ensures an orderly shutdown of virtual machines at the protected site, synchronizes the data with the failover site by ensuring complete data replication, and finally, recovers virtual machines at the failover site. Planned migration ensures application consistency to the secondary site with no data loss.

Does VMware Site Recovery provide application-consistent or crash-consistent recovery?

vSphere Replication supports optional VSS-based application consistency for Windows environments and Linux file system quiescing. When executing a planned migration (as opposed to DR failover), VMware Site Recovery provides fully application-consistent migrations between sites since virtual machines are gracefully shut down before completing replication and initiating the recovery plan.

Does VMware Site Recovery support active/active sites?

Yes, VMware Site Recovery supports configurations in which both sites are running active virtual machines that VMware Site Recovery can recover at the other site. VMware Site Recovery also supports active/passive sites in which Site Recovery Manager recovers virtual machines from a protected site at a recovery site that is not running other virtual machines during normal operation.

In an active/active scenario, users configure recovery plan workflows in one direction from Site 1 to Site 2 for the protected virtual machines at Site 1. Recovery plan workflows are configured in the opposite direction from Site 2 to Site 1 for the protected virtual machines at Site 2.

Does VMware Site Recovery support a many-to-one disaster recovery configuration?

Yes. VMware Site Recovery provides the option to protect multiple sites using a common “shared recovery site.” You will still need multiple instances of Site Recovery Manager running at this shared recovery site. Each instance manages the pairing with one of the protected sites. However, to provide simpler disaster recovery management in a many-to-one configuration, only one instance of vCenter Server is required at the shared recovery site. All instances of Site Recovery Manager register with that single vCenter Server instance. Please consult the product documentation for more details on how to use this feature.

In addition to the shared recovery site configuration, VMware Site Recovery supports shared protected site (1:N) and many-to-many (N:N) configurations. It is also supported, to begin with a standard two-site SRM deployment and later on add additional site pairings to add in more complex topologies. Keep in mind that while Site Recovery Manager does allow for the failover of different VMs to different sites, it does not support the failover of the same VM to multiple recovery sites. VMware Site Recovery only supports a VM protected by a single Site Recovery Manager pair.

Product Requirements

Does VMware Site Recovery require two active vCenter Server instances?

Yes, Site Recovery Manager requires two active and licensed vCenter Server instances, one at each site (protected and recovery). NOTE: The shared recovery/protected sites feature in Site Recovery Manager enables multiple protected or recovery sites with multiple vCenter Server instances to be recovered or protected at a site with a single vCenter Server instance. (I.e., the multiple instances of Site Recovery Manager running at the shared recovery/protection sites are registered with the same single instance of vCenter Server at the shared recovery/protection site, so you do not need multiple vCenter Server instances at the shared recovery/protection site.).

What changes and doesn't change when VMware Site Recovery fails over a VM?

SRM is coordinating the replication of the VMX file, and moving the VM to a new vCenter, so the attributes it preserves are the ones that are in the VMX file, and unrelated specifically to the protected site vCenter.

What is preserved:
- GUID (note that the placeholder VM at the recovery site will have it's own UUID. However after a failover, the recovered VM will have the same UUID as it did at the protected site)
- MAC address
- VM config (nics, drives, etc)

What is not preserved
- MOID
- Reservations/limits (these can be configured on the placeholder, or even better, use a resource pool and map it in SRM)
- DRS configurations (affinity/anti-affinity rules, DRS groups, etc)
- VM permissions

More details on reservations, affinity rules and limits:
When Site Recovery Manager recovers a virtual machine to the recovery site, it does not preserve any reservations, affinity rules, or limits that you have placed on the virtual machine. Site Recovery Manager does not preserve reservations, affinity rules, and limits on the recovery site because the recovery site might have different resource requirements to the protected site.
You can set reservations, affinity rules, and limits for recovered virtual machines by configuring reservations and limits on the resource pools on the recovery site and setting up the resource pool mapping accordingly. Alternatively, you can set reservations, affinity rules, or limits manually on the placeholder virtual machines on the recovery site.

Can VMware Site Recovery failover automatically?

Technically yes. Is it recommended? No. SRM workflows, including failover, can be triggered by a script. However, falling over in an automated fashion is a poor idea in almost all scenarios.  There is a lot of risks associated with it and a lot of potential liability for failing over due to incorrect reasoning.  However, failing over automatically in test mode makes a lot of sense. For more details, see this blog post – Automating Failover with SRM and PowerCLI

What are the requirements for having SRM change VM IP addresses?

There are two requirements.
1. The VM must have a supported version of VMtools installed
2. The OS on the VM must be compatible with vCenter's Guest OS Customization feature. This can be checked here

Product Features

Does VMware Site Recovery require the protected and recovery site networks to be the same?

No. Site Recovery Manager can change virtual machines' IP address and VLAN at the time of recovery to the configuration the user specifies during setup.

Does Site Recovery Manager update Domain Name System (DNS) tables at the recovery site?

Site Recovery Manager can update the IP address and virtual switch for recovered virtual machines but does not update DNS tables at the recovery site. However, both Windows and Linux have dynamic DNS options that can do this. An example script for updating Microsoft DNS and BIND servers is included in the scripts folder on Site Recovery Manager servers.

During failover, are virtual machines shut down and started serially or in parallel?

Virtual machines are shut down in the reverse order that they are powered on. The user can specify the order in which virtual machines must be started, either serially because of dependencies or in parallel if required.

How much overhead does Site Recovery Manager place on each virtual machine?

Site Recovery Manager does not run any components in the virtual machine or on the vSphere ESX® server during regular operation, so it does not affect the performance of virtual machines. vSphere Replication places minimal overhead on replicated VMs.

How much bandwidth is required between sites?

Bandwidth requirements depend on the amount of data being replicated, and the frequency of replication. Site Recovery Manager sends very little information between sites itself and as a result, generally has no impact on the bandwidth required between sites. To estimate how much bandwidth vSphere Replication uses, use the vSphere Replication Bandwidth Calculator.

Does Site Recovery Manager verify that the virtual machines have booted successfully at the recovery site?

Yes. Site Recovery Manager monitors whether VMware Tools has started running in each virtual machine to determine whether the virtual machines have booted successfully.

If Site Recovery Manager is running in a virtual machine and the virtual machine fails, can Site Recovery Manager still execute failover?

Execution of recovery does not depend on the vCenter Server or Site Recovery Manager Service at the protected site. However, recovery depends on a running vCenter Server and Site Recovery Manager Service at the recovery site. When the Site Recovery Manager Service is running in a virtual machine, vSphere High Availability can be used to restart the Site Recovery Manager virtual machine in case of a host failure.

How does Site Recovery Manager handle the loss of network connectivity between sites?

Site Recovery Manager notifies the administrator when it cannot connect to the remote site. Failover is always manually initiated to avoid split-brain scenarios. Recovery does not require connectivity to the protected site.

Are logs of test and failover execution exportable from Site Recovery Manager?

Yes. They are available in the History section of each Recovery Plan.

Can Site Recovery Manager automatically initiate failover?

Site Recovery Manager does not automatically initiate failover. Failover initiation must be done manually. A best practice is to limit which users have permission to initiate failover strictly. 

If we have two sites with enough bandwidth, why do we need Site Recovery Manager rather than just using vSphere vMotion® between the sites?

vSphere vMotion® is applicable only when the virtual machine is still running. If an outage occurs, vSphere vMotion has no running virtual machine to operate on. Site Recovery Manager is designed to handle cases where virtual machines are no longer running at the production site because of an outage and must be recovered at a recovery site.

Can Site Recovery Manager be integrated with other disaster recovery management software?

VMware provides a REST API for Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication that enables custom integration with other disaster recovery software. Site Recovery Manager does not provide built-in integration with third-party software products.

What happens if I run a DR workflow with the sites disconnected and then want to use my recovery plan again?

After running the recovery connect the sites (first making sure that the originally protected VMs are powered off) and run a planned migration of the recovery plan that they had done a disaster recovery of. SRM is intelligent enough to know it has already performed a failover and will skip unnecessary steps. Rerunning the plan will ensure that the steps that weren't completed at the original site are completed and get's the plan back into the appropriate state to reverse the direction of replication.

Do I need to have VMtools installed on my VMs?

Having VMtools installed on VMs recovered by SRM is not required, though it is helpful. SRM will use VMtools for a few things related to recovery:

  • VMtools will be used to shut down VMs gracefully as opposed to powering them off
  • VMtools heartbeats will be used to let SRM know that a VM is ready and to start the next VM or step in the recovery plan
  • VMtools are used to customize IP addresses when supported by the VM OS
What if I want different recovery settings (IP address, start order, etc) for the same VM in different recovery plans?

That is currently not supported. Customization settings in SRM are associated with protected virtual machines. If the same protected virtual machine is a part of multiple recovery plans, then all recovery plans use a single copy of the customization settings.

Can a VM get one address during a test and another during a failover?

You configure IP customization as part of configuring the recovery properties of a virtual machine, so when using the SRM IP customization, a VM will receive the same IP address in both a Test and a Recovery.

It would be possible to write and run a script as part of recovery to detect whether a test or actual failover was being run and to have the script customize the IP address accordingly. That said, the main idea of running a test with SRM is to duplicate the actual failover. Using different addresses for test and recovery doesn’t fit with that, so it isn’t supported directly in the product.

Can I run an SRM test with the site-to-site links disconnected?

Running a recovery plan test is supported with vSphere Replication.

Can I use SRM to meet my RTO of “x”?

Calculating a probable recovery time objective (RTO) is not simple as there are many variables that are unique to each customer's implementation. These are just guidelines as the only way to get a real feel for the recovery time is to try it in your environment. Running a test failover will also give you an idea of how long your recovery will take. Keep in mind that an actual failover or planned migration will be the most accurate.

So what influences the possible failover time? Here are a few of the major factors:

  • Number of protected VMs
  • Number of recovery sites hosts (number of ESXi hosts is an optimization axis, more hosts you have, faster you recover the VM’s, assume one host can easily power on well in excess of 100 VMs per minute if needed and if resource available)
  • Resource utilization of recovery sites hosts (if hosts are running other workloads this will need to be factored in)
  • PostPowerOn Guest Customization steps (if used, think network changes, each IP customization enabled VM will reboot twice so add-in that additional time to the total accumulated time)

When recovering VM’s via vSphere Replication this is software-based replication so there are no storage devices to remount. 

What are the ports used by SRM?

See this section of the documentation for details

I want to protect “x” software with VMware Site Recovery, will it work?

If your VM runs on an OS that is supported on vSphere and can be powered off and back on without issue, then it will be able to be recovered by SRM. From the VMs perspective, that is all that happens to a VM when it is failed over or is recovered by SRM. It powers off (either crashing in the event of a disaster or shutdown via VMtools in a planned migration) and then powers back on at the recovery site. Everything related to replicating storage, placeholder VMs, etc, is invisible to the VMs OS.

This isn’t to say that all VMs can be successfully recovered with SRM, just that there are no specific restrictions to SRM that would cause it not to work with a particular application.

Replication

What is vSphere Replication?

vSphere Replication is the industry’s first hypervisor-based replication, purpose-built for vSphere and Site Recovery Manager. vSphere Replication enables replication between sites at an individual virtual machine level and is managed directly in vCenter Server. With vSphere Replication, customers can deploy heterogeneous storage arrays across sites, reducing costs by using lower-end storage at the failover site.

What is Enhanced Replication for VMware Site Recovery?

Enhanced Replication for VMware Site Recovery is the future of vSphere Replication. It supports all the capabilities of vSphere Replication and provides automatic load balancing, automatic scaling, 1 min RPO, and easier management. It is currently IA (initial availability). For more details, see this blog.

What RPO can I expect with vSphere Replication?

With vSphere Replication, users can select the replication schedule for each VM. The RPO can be selected from 5 minutes to 24 hours.

Are there any additional restrictions for using vSphere Replication?

vSphere Replication cannot be used with VMs that are not powered on, vSphere Fault Tolerance, Virtual Machine templates, linked clones, and physical RDMs.

Where can I get answers to more questions about vSphere Replication?

See the vSphere Replication FAQ here

Design

What applications can I protect with VMware Site Recovery?

Any application that is supported on vSphere is supported for protection with Site Recovery Manager. That said there are some things that shouldn't be protected with Site Recovery Manager. This blog has the details.

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