The Network Prerequisites

For successful testing, we need to meet some network prerequisites to avoid duplicate IPs in your environment. As explained in the previous chapter, all data movers must be configured to recover servers inside the isolated network for testing purposes. To be able to do that, you need to create an isolated network inside the VMware vSphere environment. This isolated network will allow you to test all your servers inside that isolated network without interfacing with your production network.

Depending on your environment settings we can recognize two cases:

• servers are recovered on a single ESXi host
• servers are recovered on multiple ESXi hosts (cluster solution)

In case you are recovering all servers into a single isolated network on a single host, no other action needs to be performed. In case you are recovering servers on multiple ESXi hosts, you need to establish connectivity between those ESXi hosts in the isolated network by configuring your external switch.

Depending on how many subnets you have inside your VMware vSphere environment, we can recognize two cases:

• servers are recovered into an isolated network without the need for routing capability
• servers are recovered into an isolated network with a need for routing capability

In the case where all of your servers are inside the same subnet, no additional steps need to be performed. If your servers are configured in multiple subnets, you will need to enable routing capabilities between those subnets. Routing could be done with a physical router configured in your environment or by using some predefined VM appliance/server available on market. Ask your network support team to help you establish routing capabilities between different subnets, whether you restore servers on a single ESXi host or across multiple ESXi hosts (in a cluster).