Migrating DR Environment

Mike, What size pipes were you working with between these sites?  We have been seeding at 1G/10G, but I have set the bandwidth throttle to 35Mb/s and that has been pretty illuminating (DR only has a 40Mb/s pipe and we still need to run the plant as well).  We’re not going to need a bigger boat, just much bigger pipes!

Our gameplan is to shut down all protected VMs while the transition is happening – the holiday weekend is the only time we could string a few days in a row.

I’d be interested to hear how many VMs you were protecting and what size pipe you had between them?  We have a smaller implementation (17 VMs).

OK!

We had worked out a solid game-plan with my home-slice Sean Masters (he has basically held my hand through our whole Zerto implementation).  We decided that to limit the amount of config changes, we would temporarily setup the VLANs supporting the DR environment in HQ so that we would not have to change any IPs after moving the equipment to it’s final happy place.

We shut down protected VMs & paused the associated VPGs.  After this we shut down the DR VRAs, ZVM, vCenter, hosts, fabric, & storage.  We removed any network wizardry that we had in-place and then got the routing back for the VLANs we had setup temporarily pointing now to DR across the WAN.

All DR toys were then road-tripped to DR location, unloaded, and racked-up.  We starting cabling back up, but by the time I hooked up the wrong cable to the wrong switch for the eleventeenth time, we decided to call it a night.

After getting some rest we were able to get it all wired up the next day.  The fabric, SAN, hosts, vCenter, ZVM, & VRAs were started back up (in that order) and once Zerto re-established communication, we un-paused all of the VPGs and started the protected VMs back up.

We were completely surprised by how well everything came back up – again thanks to Sean for his guidance (and patience).

Now if we can get our internet pipes to hulk out, I think we’ll be golden!