September Lunch & Learns with Dell and VMWare

By slpowers on October 2, 2013 • ( 0 )

In September we ventured out with Dell and VMWare to discuss why protecting applications against disasters has never been more important.

We talked about how expanding disaster protection to all your applications, and smaller sites with vCenter Site Recovery Manager can reduce the cost of disaster recovery by consolidating your recovery infrastructure and using cost-efficient vSphere Replication.

Guests were invited to attend this seminar to learn:

Disaster Recovery with vSphere and vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.1
Simple Recovery and Migration Plans
Fully Automated Disaster Failovers and Planned Migrations
How Dell and VMware are delivering integrated enterprise solutions to help reduce the cost of IT through highly automated and scalable solutions

Keith Hannah discussed how Dell Equallogic and Compellent systems are designed to be fully managed within VMware Vcenter console.

He also discussed how SAN to SAN replication is the most efficient way to replicate data in conjunction with VMware SRM.

Keith also shared Dell’s most recent addition to their server line, the VRTX.

VRTX is an all in one virtualization solution, consisting of servers, storage, and switching. There was quite a lot of excitement around this product, as it has many unique features, and a price point that makes it affordable for any business to deploy a robust and redundant solution, whether it is being used in small businesses, or branch offices in larger organizations.

Josh Spranger, one of SLPowers senior engineers, explained the inner workings of VMware’s site recovery manager (SRM).

Mr. Spranger explained that although VSphere includes site to site replication, it does not include any methodology to bring servers online in the DR site.

He explained that bringing a large amount of servers online manually at a DR site can be a very time consuming proposition, often needing multiple days to complete the process.

Josh took some time to explain the scripting features which are built into SRM that allow for an automated fail over and fail back, and how it can be set up to manage different IP and subnet schemas between sites, also how DNS changes can be automated. Another very important point he mentioned was how SRM allows you to test your DR plan in a non-disruptive manner using a sandbox methodology. Using this testing methodology also yields detailed reports which satisfy regulatory compliance requirements.