Here's our setup:

Production:

• 2 Clustered ESXi Hosts
• 1 DPE
• 1 DAE

DR Site:

• 1 ESXi Host
• 1 DPE

We have 3 NFS VMware datastores: NFS-Performance, NFS-Capacity, NFS-Backup. NFS-Performance are the faster drives, NFS-Capacity is the bigger drives, and NFS-Backup is used by VMware Data Recovery to store virtual machine backups. In addition to our NFS datastores, we have approximately 10 CIFS shares, and 1 iSCSI for Exchange 2010.

All of the NFS datastores as well as the CIFS shares are replicated to the DR DPE. The iSCSI is not replicated because we haven't migrated any mailboxes to Exchange 2010 yet.

We do not have anything else stored on the DR DPE currently, i.e. the DR ESXi is not running any virtual machines. VCenter is on a virtual machine in the production site which manages the DR ESXi host as well.

How does a DR scenario play out with our current setup? For instance, let's pretend the production site no longer exist, then what?

• Do I simply point the DR ESXi host at the DR DPE and it should see all the datastores and the virtual machines, power up VCenter and everything is good?
• Do I initiate a Fail Over on the DR DPE first?
• How do I test this...?

Would VMware Site Replication Manager facilitate my DR enough to warrant the cost? Do I need Replication Manager from EMC for the iSCSI replication?

Thanks for any insight