SRM for free with PowerCLI – Part 1: NFS
Also see SRM for free with PowerCLI – Part 2: iSCSI
Working in an enterprise company DR, BR, BCP, whatever you want to call it, is everything. With potentially many thousands of people around the globe, being able to get people working again as soon as possible after a disaster can mean the difference between being in business and going bust.
The best way to do business recovery is to design it from the ground up and make it part of every architecture design you put together. Thinking about the what-if of a disaster after everything is up and running often means you have to start again.
One of the great things about virtual worlds is you can easily (not necessarily cheaply though!) have a separate virtual infrastructure in both locations with shared storage. Simply by mirroring the storage from Site A to Site B you can recover VMs from Site A in Site B very easily without having to have a separate VM in Site B that you need to keep up to date.
This is where VMware’s SRM comes into play. SRM is a fairly powerful piece of software for running and testing your BR. It talks to your back-end storage and can automate the different steps required such as breaking the storage mirror, presenting the storage to your ESX hosts, adding the VMs to your inventory and powering them on.
Sounds great but firstly it is a product you need to pay for and secondly when it came out it didn’t support NFS so PowerCLI (it wasn’t called PowerCLI when we did it) came to the rescue.
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