SRM in a Box

Tomas ten Dam release his final version of the SRM in a Box document. You can grab your copy here: srm-in-a-box-final-release-the-complete-setup.

The last few years “disaster recovery” has become a hot topic in the IT industry. Working in a 24/7 economy demands greater availability to our computer systems. But what to do if a disaster strikes at your production site? You can have backup tapes, disks or even a mirrored storage at another site, but it can take hours or even days to start up a new production site which is available to your employees. Customers can’t be served in those days, and that will result in financial losses. VMware Site Recovery Manager makes disaster recovery easy and will save you time when a disaster happened. The big problem for a consultant or engineer is how to test and learn how SRM is working. If you want to test this, expensive hardware must be available for quite some time. You need double storage, a couple of esx servers and some hardware to host 2 domain controllers, virtual center servers and SQL servers. And what if you need a demo for a customer? You can’t have all the expensive hardware at your site for just showing how it works. I am working with VMware and Netapp most off the time lately en was thinking; maybe it is possible to build a test lab with SRM in VMware workstation. I had a Netapp simulator and VMware esx is working in Workstation 6.5 so why not give it a try. And it works! In this document I am going to describe what I did to make it work. Have fun!