We are planning on swapping production VMs between our two data centers on a regular basis. We’re using Power Max storage with SRDF Metro (synchronous) replication, VMware with SRM protected VMs, Commvault Primary backup at the DC where the VMs happen to be at the time and an AUX copy at the other DC. We backup VM snapshot images (so Agent-less).
We can configure SRM to maintain UUID after a failover to the Secondary site (secondary vCentre), so the licensing issue seems fine. SRDF Metro replication keeps the sites in sync, so from a VMware perspective, both sites ‘see’ the same disk IDs. My question is about finding a way to configure Commvault to recognize the AUX copies as Primary, AND, more importantly, continue to leverage the same CBT info from the Primary site. This should be possible given SRDF Metro maintains bit level duplication of all disks/blocks.
Without CBT continuation across sites, after failing 500-ish VMs over to the Secondary site, we’re looking at at full re-seeding of all VMs - so tens of TB of data that needs to be read from PMAX. Not only this will take days to complete (breaking our RPO), it will also severely impact runtime performance for the Production environment (due to high IOps inflicted on storage by Commvault reads).
There is some reference to CBT on this page (vCenter Migration (commvault.com)) but is not clear if it matches our use case or how to implement.
Any ideas we could try would be much appreciated. Thank you