Thanks for the info. What you are doing could actually be a nightmare, depending on your goals.
From you original post you have a problem:
- Hardware is End Of Life
Your Goals are:
- Replication to DR
- Hardware Agnostic
Your Hardware is end of life. Understood. You need to get your data over to new storage and over to DR. This raises new questions.
- Is this a new DR site or Existing?
- Is Cost an issue
- Are you planning on using VMware SRM?
Personally I recommend that you leverage Storage to Storage Migration of your data. Especially working on storage of that size. Remove VMWare from the equation on replicating the data. It will be less time consuming, easier to maintain, and much easier to expand. I recommend for your next step to leaverage VMware SRM policies to run your environment in DR.
If you wish to stay vendor agnostic on the storage, then look at solutions from companies like Acronis or CommVault on getting your DR strategy working.
Strongly, STRONGLY not recommend virtualizing the whole 45 TBs to VMDKs and use VMware replication. You can do it, very possible infact. But it will be time consuming and all on you should replication go south. I suspect it would be slow from a IOPS perspective vs Block level replication and storage. VMware replication is for small offices that have less than couple TBs in storage.
Hope this helps
Boston Tech Guy.