We have a data center set up running a mix of VMWare 5.0 and 5.1 on a number of HP BL465c blades. The storage is on an EMC VNX5700 array. VCenter 5.1 is on a physical machine local to the data center.
We have also set up a secondary data center, with its own VNX and blades. There is a VCenter 5.1 installation on a physical machine there.
The two data centers are connected over a redundant 10Gb Ethernet link. The two storage arrays replicate most of the luns from the primary site to the secondary site using EMC MirrorView.
We're going to be setting up Site Recovery Manager to handle the failover in case the primary one goes down.
The primary data center has about 20 hosts, and there are about 15 at the secondary. In a D/R scenario, not every VM at the primary will be failed over to the secondary.
Currently each data center has its own physical VCenter installation. When I upgraded VCenter to 5.1, I installed the single sign on functions on each VCenter server (since the idea is for each data center to operate if the other is down, I didn't want to point them both on the same SSO server).
I'm looking for some information/recommendations for managing the two data centers with VCenter.
What is the best way to migrate a VM from one data center to the other? I'm not referring to a failover situation, but more like a VMotion/Storage VMotion migration. This wouldn't necessarily need to be any kind of "live" migration (although that would be ideal), but more for relocating a VM to the secondary site. I did some research and saw a note that you can move between data centers, but only if they're both managed by the same VCenter. I tried using the VCenter standalone converter, but it was really slow and I'd like to find a way within VCenter.
For the VM relocation, would it be possible to set up an NFS mount on the storage at one site, have a blade from each data center connected to it, then put a VM on it, do a "remove from inventory" from the one VCenter install and then do an "add to inventory" on the VNX file on the other VCenter?
Also, is it possible (and is there any benefit) to operate the VCenter installs in linked mode? Would that help with migrating VM's from one data center to the other? That would simplify the management of the two VCenter environments, but according to the info I've found, to use linked mode, both VCenter installations must be registered to the same SSO server. Since we need to have each data center operate if the other is down, we can't have a single SSO server, is there some way we can use linked mode?
Any suggestions or information would be appreciated.
Mike O.