CDP between two sites

[sahara]

Hello I am searching for a solution to make a synchronous replication between two sites. Would CDP work for this? Also, will it work to connect two Vcenters?
The storage of the two sites is not interconnected, so I cannot use only one Vcenter with two clusters. The idea is to synchronize continously to site 2, If site 1 carshes I can then move to site 2 with the production. And when site 1 is back online it should sync the other way around so that we cam move quickly back.

Is this possible?

Thanks!

[vmtech123]

CDP works with 1 vCenter, but in an ideal situation you have one at both sites. Due to VMware not going to support image level backups and a potential of a few minutes of data loss I think this would not be ideal.

That's not saying you can't use CDP to replicate all your VM's to the other site. It works great. but in a DR situation if you want to have control of all the hosts, dswitches and everything vCenter at both sites is the way to go.

I use a combo of CDP and SRM for DR as our SAN supports site to site replication with change volumes. It powers down all VM's in the volume, syncs, flips direction and brings it up. I don't even have to resync back as it's already in sync.

[sahara]

Thanks. So if I understood correctly if I have 1 CDP at each site connected to the respective Vcenter, I can synchronize the VMs from Site 1 to Site 2 and if I make changes on 2 it can synchronite from 2 to 1? So active-active essentially. And this would work over IP?

I assume I would also need 2 veeam installasions?

Thanks!

[vmtech123]

You need a proxy at both sites, however it might make sense to create a new Veeam server for CDP at the DR site, or keep your VBR server there.

If your main site goes down, vCenter and Veeam are both going to have issues if they are at the main site with no connectivity.

I just read it can be done with a single vCenter in these forums, I use 2 so I'm not really sure. If you don't have a second vCenter, how do you add the I/O filters in that cluster?