Category: Solutions Enabler

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Point-in-time test recovery with SRDF and VMware SRM

As many are probably aware, RecoverPoint 4.0 recently released support for Point-In-Time test recovery and recovery for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager. In conjunction with the RP SRA and the Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) users can select a PiT in the past instead of automatically being forced to use the latest copy.

Since this came out (and many times prior) I have been asked can we do this with the SRDF SRA and TimeFinder along with VMware SRM? The answer is yes! The process though is somewhat different of course. By far this question is mostly targeted for test recovery only, as most conversely prefer up-to-date images when they actually failover. So this post will focus on test recovery. Continue reading “Point-in-time test recovery with SRDF and VMware SRM”

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Migrating a Raw Device Mapping with Federated Live Migration

Migrating a virtual machine that uses 100% virtual disks is a simple task due to VMware Storage vMotion but migrating a VM that uses Raw Device Mappings from one array to another is somewhat trickier. There are options to convert a RDM into a virtual disk but that might not be feasible for applications that still require RDMs to be supported. Other options are host based mechanisms/in-guest mechanisms to copy the data from one device to another. That option sometimes can be complex and requires special drivers or even possibly downtime to fully finish the transition. To solve this issue for physical hosts, EMC introduced for the Symmetrix a feature called Federated Live Migration.

Federated Live Migration (FLM) allows the migration of a device from one Symmetrix array to another Symmetrix array without any downtime to the host and also does not affect the SCSI inquiry information of the original source device. Therefore, even though the device is now residing on a completely different Symmetrix array the host is none the wiser. FLM leverages Open Replicator functionality to migrate the data so it has some SAN requirements–the source array must be zoned to the target array. A FLM setup looks like the image below:

flmSAN Continue reading “Migrating a Raw Device Mapping with Federated Live Migration”

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Symmetrix SRDF and VMware vCenter SRM Implementation Checklist

One of the products or maybe rather solutions that I work a lot with is integrating Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) with VMware’s vCenter Site Recovery Manager. For some shameless self-promotion (I suppose can probably drop that phrase when writing on this blog because by definition a blog is inherently self-promotion, but I digress) of the implementation guide I write it can be found here:

http://www.emc.com/collateral/software/technical-documentation/h10553-sra-vmware-5-0-tb.pdf

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Continue reading “Symmetrix SRDF and VMware vCenter SRM Implementation Checklist”