How do you handle IP addressing at a DR Site

Question

I've found various tools that handle replicating virtual machines from one physical location to another for disaster recovery purposes. The part that I am struggling to understand is how these tools handle things like windows server names and IP addresses.

Certainly, I can't have two servers online connected to active directory both with the same hostname or same IP address. Do tools like vSphere Replication take care of re-iping the machine or changing its hostname? If not how do you avoid name and IP conflicts?

Answer 1

The exact scheme varies, but the key is to use separate addresses for management that always stay in place, and client-facing virtual addresses that you move or reroute on failover.

Alternatively, you can also use a translation layer (destination NAT) where the virtual addresses are always translated to the actual server addresses and where you swap those addresses on failover.

If bandwidth allows, you can also continuously replicate the VMs to the shadow location. On failover, you then just shut down the original VMs (if necessary), run the replicated ones and reroute their addresses.