Daily Hypervisor

VMware SRM is gaining a lot of traction and many companies are quickly making it the defacto choice for DR in their environments, but is SRM the right choice?  For those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to get familiar with SRM (Site Recovery manager), it is a Disaster Recovery automation product from VMware that integrates into vCenter.  Through the use of SRA’s (Storage Replication Adapters) SRM is able to integrate with many storage arrays making it aware of Datastores that are replicated.  Some of it’s most popular fetures include the ability to group servers in to recovery groups giving you the ability to fail groups of servers or a whole datacenter.  It also allows you to perform live failover tests on the  the same groups of servers or an entire site.  These are some of the most popular reasons companies are implementing SRM.  The ability to easily run DR tests without impacting live running systems has made it a huge success.  SRM also allows you to create DR run book automation through the use of linear workflows that you create to perform different steps and tasks involved with failing over from the primary site to a secondary.

All of this is great stuff right?  What could possibly be better that this?   What can’t SRM do?

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Back in the summer, I saw Stu’s Post about automating the installation of ESXi. I was reminded again by Duncan’s Post. Then, I found myself in a situation when a customer bought 160 blades for VMware ESXi. With this many systems, it would be almost impossible to do this without mistakes. I took the ideas from Stu and Duncan and created an ESXi automated installer that works from a PXE deployment server, like the Ultimate Deployment Appliance. I took it a step further and added the ability to use a USB stick or a CD for those times when PXE is not allowed. The document below is a result of it.

This is a little different than the idea of a stateless ESXi server, where the hypervisor actually boots from PXE. This is the installer booting from PXE so that the hypervisor can be installed on local disk, an internal USB stick or SD card. You could also use it for a “boot from SAN” situation, but extreme care should be taken so you don’t accidentally format a VMFS disk.

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