Recently Jason Boche posted about the requirement for a good script to start and stop your datacenter. I’m sure a lot of people read it and said, “I don’t need one for those since I don’t shut everything down.” Well, the truth is you might need one of these things sooner or later. We all plan for disasters (or should) no matter how big or small we are. During that planning we often come up with playbooks for how to start and stop certain services. We even might come up with a playbook on which services or application stacks to start and in which order. The question is do we ever really check that it’s all correct? That’s something that’s probably pretty tricky to do since we don’t want to shut everything down and restart it to go through the test. However, when the rubber meets the road and your datacenter does go down it’s good to know that you can get it back up and running and exactly how long that will take.
Ever want to setup DR but don’t have a SAN? Well, there’s several ways you can do that. The newest one is to use the EMC Celera Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA). Chad Sakac over at Virtual Geek just published the very thorough (and long) guide on how to set this up. Don’t want to use EMC for some reason? NetApp and LeftHand (now HP) have guides of their own. For NetApp go here. For LeftHand go here.
It really is amazing to see the tight integration between VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and these new virtual storage arrays. It’s the power of virtualization coming together.
Let me know if you find solutions like this useful. It’s always a team effort to get something like this out the door for the joint customers. It’s good to get feedback on whether it’s useful or not.
Scott Lowe is up to his usual self – posting really great information about virtualization. This time it’s about SRM and NetApp arrays. I see this combination a lot with customers. I just can’t wait until we officially support NFS with SRM. Then maybe I can replicate my IOmega NAS device at home with the one at my brother’s house for personal DR. 
(Via Scott Lowe’s Blog.)
