vCenter in failover plan

[michaelryancook]

I'm sure this has been asked and answered before but my searches are failing me. We currently have a primary and DR site. We are using a Veeam B&R server in our DR site to replicate VMs to that site. We are using a single vCenter in our primary site to manage hosts in both sites. We are trying to detail our failover process. Currently we are expecting we will need to find the domain controllers, SQL server and vCenter server by connecting to each host manually. Then we would power them on from the individual hosts. Once we have the DCs, SQL and vCenter up we would execute the failover plan in Veeam B&R to bring up the rest of our environment.

Is there an easier way of doing this? I feel like I am missing something that would allow me to bring the entire environment up without manually connecting to the hosts. Would I need DCs running at the DR site with a separate vCenter?

TIA, Michael.

[dellock6]

Hi Michael,
if I understood correctly, you have two clusters, one per site, managed by a single vCenter that is in the primary site.

So, indeed the entire environment in Veeam is seen via that single vCenter, and it's indeed not available immediately during a failover. Out of my mind, you can do few things to optimize the start of the entire failover:
- for DCs, it's always a good choice to have at least one DC always running at the DR site, so there's no need to power on one of the others
- for vCenter, I guess you have a separated machine for its SQL database, have you evaluated the new vCenter 6 with embedded postgreSQL? This would reduce the complexity by having a single VM for both roles. There's also the vCenter appliance if you want

For the failover you will need indeed vCenter, but you can use some scripting to find in which host the vcenter is and even start both SQL and vCenter VMs. You can install VMware PowerCLI on the Veeam server, so you do not need for example to open ssh on the ESXi hosts, and do something like this:

Code: Select all

asnp VMware.VimAutomation.Core -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

Connect-VIServer -Server 10.2.0.1 -User root -Password password -WarningAction SilentlyContinue
Get-VM | Select Name,VMHost
Disconnect-VIServer -Confirm:$false

If you just have few hosts, you can just repeat the lines for each one, or create a cycle. After you found where the VM is, you can either connect via vSphere client and power it on, or again use PowerCLI.

[michaelryancook]

Thank you for the response Luca. You have understood our setup and the reasoning for a separate SQL server. We have not done any evaluation of vCenter 6 yet. Hopefully we will have time in the next few months. I have used the vCenter appliance in the past but as it still lacks VUM we have excluded it as an option. We are attempting to design our DR site as a potential long term solution in the case of a major disaster with dreams of active-active datacenters in the future.

I will take your advice and spin up a DC at the DR site and look into scripting the search for our SQL and vCenter VM. As we have only 5 hosts it is not a tedious process but anything that can simplify the process during a real disaster would be helpful.