Number of vcenter needed

ok thanks!

While it would be nice to have 3 vCenters it is not required. What I would do is create a vRPA cluster at EACH datacenter so that you know which vRPA cluster to select when you are protecting a VM.

Meaning you don't want a vRPA at one of the local campus site protecting a VM at the other local campus site. Im guessing that the latency is very low so this may not be a huge deal , but every little bit of latency may matter to the application

One other note, vCenter is used for failover / failback. Without vCenter it is difficult and sometimes impossible to failover...therefore its better to use both.

Ok, so I can have only 1 vcenter managing for all the 3 sites/DC  ? (locals and remote?)

thanks

yes, I agree with you, having only one vcenter, for example for a classic 2 DC, it impossible to failover to the other remote  DC if the first DC failed and you have the vcenter inside the failed DC?

If you have 2 vcenters (source and DR) and the source vcenter fails you can recover the VMs at the 2nd datacenter. There is a RP plugin per vCenter. Was this your question?

ok thakls, but my question was , if you have just one vcenter (at source site, managing source and DR site)  and source site crash, how you make the failover ? thanks

I see, today this would not be possible, something that is being worked on.

This is similar to the recent discussion I had here:

Can I protect VCENTER VM with RP for vm?

The RP4VMs plugin cannot be used if vCenter is down but manual operations can be performed to bring up replica VMs. There would be no orchestration (VM startup priority, user prompts/scripts, etc.) since this is done on a vCenter level but manually that is doable.

As I said on the other thread, we would capture it in a White Paper for the benefit of everyone, if there are any questions, feel free to reach out to me directly.

Thanks,

Idan Kentor

RecoverPoint Corporate Systems Engineering

idan.kentor@emc.com

Would it be possible to clone the Source vCenter Server VM across to the Secondary/DR Site and then bring this online if we had a failure at the Primary Site to still be able to Failover to Copied VM's within the RP4VM Cluster ?

If it would have connectivity to the relevant ESXs, same IPs and SSO kept, it should work. It's really outside of RPVM's control and if VMW's would support such a process, we would recommend it as well. There are couple of official supported ways to have HA for vCenter vCSA in 6.5 as well as official backup and restore capabilities for vCSA in 6.0 and up.

Hope that helps,

Idan

Thanks for the Reply Idan...  If you could pass on the links to the vCSA 6.0 backup and restore capabilities that would be great..  We are currently using a windows VM vCenter 6.0 with the embedded database at the moment..  I haven't actually tested this clone/failover approach as yet but will do so in the coming week..