Hello,



I will need to power off a "Metro Standby Site", which has VMs running on it.

I would like to manually migrate those VMs to the primary (active) site and Shut down / Power Off the nodes in the Standby site approx. 24-36 hours.

All VMs need to be running on the active side and no VMs are to be restarted (RTO + RPO =0).



The steps I propose to take to achieve the goal are as follows:



I have included as much environment info as possible.



Any insight or corrections to this process are welcome.



Thanks in Advance



Phase I (Configure Standby Site)

1. Disable/suspend the (x1) asynch PD (from Primary)
   
2. Update VMware DRS Rules (Manual) (from Primary)
   
3. Disable HA
   
4. Manually perform vMotion of all VMs to active site.
   
5. Configured VM affinities to the hosts of the primary site and set the DRS rules to Fully Automated.
   
6. Create new VMGroup and Host Group if needed
   
7. I do not want to disable DRS and lose my DRS Affinity Rules
   
8. Disable Metro per PD (x3) (from Primary)
   

Phase II (Power Off)

1. Shut down CVM(s) on (Standby site only)
   
2. Put VMware Host(s) in "Standby Mode" (Standby site only)
   
3. Power Off Nutanix Node(s) (IPMI) (Standby site only)
   

Phase III (Power Up) (Standby site only)



1. Power on Nutanix Node(s) (IPMI)

3. Disable "Standby Mode"

4. Ensure CVM(s) Powered Up

a. Status Checks





Phase IV (Re-enable PD)

1. Migrate VMs back to Standby Site (previous VMs via affinity rules?)
   
2. From the Primary Prism console establish the metro availability configuration by clicking Re-enable on each PD.
   
3. Reestablish the DRS affinity Rules to VMs to original Groups etc.
   
4. Reenable the async PD
   

Overview:

Power Off DEB Hosts for Extended period not to exceed 36 hours



DEA (Primary) (5 Node)

DEB (Standby) (5 Node)

DEB to be Powered Off



VMs are running on the Standby Hosts



Environment: (Same)

Ntx-XX-XXX / Ntx-XX-XXX



Nutanix

AOS 5.10.5 (LTS)

NCC 3.7.1.2



ESXi 6.7.0

VMware 6.7.0.30000



3 Blocks

5 Hosts

Blocks 1-2 NX-8035-G4 x2

Block 3 NX-8035-G5 x1



Blocks 1-2 (x4 Hosts)

Block 3 (x1 Host)





Cluster Config:

DRS: Enabled (Fully Automated) (Default settings)

HA: Enabled



Remote Site:

x1 Remote site

vStore Mapping:

Hci-XXX-adv-01 : hci-XXX-adv-01-mirror



Metro Availability PDs: both sides have identical resources, Disk, CPU, Memory



Active:

x3 active Containers



Standby:

x3 standby Containers



Async: (active on primary site)

x1 PD

x2 VMs



Admission Control:

Failover capacity is defined by reserving a percentage of the cluster resources.

Reserved failover CPU capacity:

25%

Reserved failover Memory capacity:

20%



Name HAEnabled HAFailover DrsEnabled DrsAutomationLevel

Level

---- --------- ---------- ---------- ------------------

Cluster Name True 1 True FullyAutomated