Our
new blog Uptime continues to deliver the goods. Two new posts from
VMware’s own Lee Dilworth cover vCenter Site Recovery Manager from the
overview (if you’re still trying to get a handle on what SRM does and
how it replaces that paper DR plan and set of scripts you’ve never
really fully tested) to the first FAQ and set of tips if you’ve been
trying it out.

First, the video. You might recognize VMware Evangelist & VMworld Europe impressario Richard Garsthagen as well, fresh off his first video hit, VMware Infrastructure 3 demo.

Next, Lee’s FAQ & tips on SRM:

Link: VMware Site Recovery Manager – “From general release to Update1, what have we learnt and what’s new?”. Lee goes into a bit more detail, but here’s sample question:

Q: What are the SRM failback options we see no button for failback which is
confusing us?

SRM absolutely supports failback and each
storage vendor documents the failback process for their specific replicated
storage configuration. What you have to consider is that without SRM in your
virtual environment you are back to manual and/or home grown scripts for DR you
will no longer have automated Recovery Plans, no offline DR testing
capabilities, and no DR audit trail.

http://www.vmware.com

I’ve been seeing lots of chatter about Site Recovery Manager lately. Books, videos, all sorts of good stuff. Tomas Ten Dam is doing a great job of covering a lot of these as well as doing yeoman’s work on his SRM in a Box project; check out his blog for more.

But
today I want to call your attention to some new proven practices on the
still stealth-mode VI:OPS site. Please take a look and feel free to
comment or rate them.

Here are some of the recent docs there: VI:OPS: Community: Availability.

• Steps to setup FalconStor NSS Virtual Appliances for VMware Site Recovery Manager              
• Steps To Create a 2-Site SRM Demo Environment on a Laptop        
• Steps to setup LeftHand Networks VSA for VMware Site Recovery
  Manager     Steps to setup EMC Celerra (iSCSI) for VMware Site Recovery
  Manager
• Steps to setup EMC Clariions for VMware Site Recovery Manager        
• Steps to setup NetApp arrays for VMware Site Recovery Manager

As VMware’s Greg Lato says, SRM “is the Easy Button for data center level disaster recovery.”