Stretched clustering is one of the challenging topics I get when meeting with customers. Many customers think that stretched clustering is the ultimate disaster recovery solution and that it makes SRM obsolete. This is due to the fact that people think that HA will solve all their problems when it comes down to DR and that they still have the advantage of vMotion to have workload mobility between two data centers.
This however isn’t always true and there are some catches to the implementation of stretched clusters. In some cases, depending on the customers requirements, it even is better to have an SRM implementation to fulfill the requirements.
The table below give a graphical representation of which solution best suits which requirement.
So in the end its up to the customer to decide which solution best suits its requirement. To help make this decision VMware Tech Marketing created a whitepaper to help make the right choice. A must read for everybody involved with disaster recovery and availability within a vSphere infrastructure.
The whitepaper can be found here.