VMware SRM and Data Center Migration

Looking back a few months ago I posted about our Primary Data Center (PDC) migration project, and how we planned to migrate our fairly large VMware environment between datacenters. My initial thought was to extend our SAN's across the 10GbE Metro net (MAN) we have in place and do VMotions and SVmotions to the new hardware in the PDC. While this did seem like a good idea to me in the beginning the powers that be chose to use VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM).

Let me just state now that SRM has worked great. The ease of use to SVMotion VM's to new "staging area" LUNs and then replicate (HDS HUR and NetApp Snapmirror) those to the PDC was so simple. Then the SRM migrations have been simple as well. The testplan have shown to be a great way to verify everything will work before the actual maintenance window.

Let me just say that I was wrong in thinking the SRM migrations would never work for our needs, but it does. Just another piece of VMware that just works and is very clean in its implementation.