Good news. Organization of the 1st ever UK VMUG User Conference/Summit is progressing and they now have agenda up!

Here’s the highlights:

Keynote: Joe Baguley – VMware Chief Cloud Technologist
I met Joe briefly when he was at Quest. Picked up some interesting view points from him, which influenced my writing this year…

Community Session: Duncan Epping/Frank Denneman – vSphere 5.0 Clustering Q&A
The dynamic duo make their first (I believe) presentation to a UK User Group. I’m sure this will be well attended.

Community Session: Cormac Hogan vSphere 5.0 New Storage Features
I’ve met Cormac a couple of times – at the ye old TSX in Europe and event I tried to launch in Ireland. This guy is very technical and I remember his top 10 storage issue went straight into my courses when I was a VMware Instructor.

Community Session: Julian Wood  vSphere 4->5 upgrade
A shout out for a buddy of mine from the London UG. Julian runs the http://www.wooditwork.com/ blog.

The community sessions run twice so you will have to think about what you are really interested in because you won’t be able to see ALL of them…

As for me I’m in the “graveyard slot” at the end of the event. The theory is my star name power will stop folks drifting away at the end of the day. Personally, I think the chance of winning an IPAD from a vendor might be the bigger draw!!!

To register & see the agenda in full – toddle off here: http://www.myvmug.org/e/in/eid=106&source=5

Introduction:

As you might know SRM 5.0 introduces support for “vSphere Replication” (VR) – where virtual appliances are deployed to assist in the replication of VMs from the Protected Site to the Recovery Site. What you might not know – is whilst this works perfectly for recoveries where the VM moves from one site (say SiteA: New York) to another (say SiteB: New Jersey) – there is no automated method of failback. That is to say, moving the VM back from the Recovery Site (SiteB: New Jersey) to Protected Site (SiteA: New York).

SRM 5.0 does introduce a new “automated failback” feature – its a combination of running a “reprotect” process to invert the “normal” path of replication – and then running a Recovery Plan to move the VMs back. Sadly, that “reprotect” and failback process didn’t make it into the first release of VR. That means a more “manual” process has be undertaken to a.) prepare for the failback and b.) return SRM and VR back to a state that it was in before the failover took place. For an experienced SRM Administrator (sic) this isn’t too much of chore or difficult – but if you are new to SRM, and intend to use VR – then it could be a bit of challenge. That’s what this article is all about.

I’ve been prompted to write this because I know that my upcoming SRM book will have a very long chapter on failover/failback but it is very much from slanted from the position of array-based replication – and there’s very little if any detail on how this process pans out when your using SRM with VR. This article is intended to plug that gap for my readers who buy the book. It’s shame that this didn’t make it into the book, but that is publishing deadlines for you. As it is, this likely to change over the lifetime of SRM 5.0 – and this article will be  darn easier to maintain and update…

For sometime I’ve been using the scenario of fictitious company called “Corp.com” which has two sites New York and New Jersey in my books. New York is meant to be the production or Protected Site during normal business operations, and New Jersey is an ancillary location to Corp.com – and is used for many purposes – in this case as the Recovery Site in SRM.

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