Multiple cluster per site, Site Recovery Manager (SRM) with svMotion capability

Here is a design VMware told me was 'unique' LOL. Sounded perfectly normal to me.

My plan was (obvious to me):
vSphere/SRM 5.0
2 locations
2 vCenters, of course required for SRM
2 clusters in each vCenter, one cluster at each location per vCenter.
Equallogic SRAs which probably doesnt matter who you have for a SAN SRA vendor.

This would give us sort of an 'X' configuration and allow us to svMotion/vMotion from location to location during business hours by simply mounting a common volume as well as have SRM capability across datacenters if bad things happened. I realize there is no longer a need for the common volume for svMotion in vSphere 5.1. Also keep in mind we have a lot of bandwidth between our sites. Your results may vary.

So the design looked valid, if interesting, on paper. All the svMotion worked fine. I just could not make the Array Managers 'see' or work with one pair of clusters within SRM. How this was visible, was that in my Array pair under site recovery for one of the vCenters, the Devices tab in the Array Pair would not show a 'Remote Device' and a 'Datastore' both for all the datastores I wanted to use. Only the ones associated with one pair. This meant I could SRM across one pair of clusters but not both

The resolution was to create a second Array Manager pair reversing the storage listings in both sites. So if in site A you had storage1 to storage2 and site B you had storage2 to storage1, that is enough to enable a single cluster per site. I had to go in to site A for example and add another pair for storage2 to storage1 and vise versa in site B giving me 2 pairs per site.

I hope this helps and I will elaborate if you want.

Charlie