"Remember kids, the only difference between Science and screwing around is writing it down" -Alex Jason (made popular by Adam Savage)
We just released our latest version of our Storage Replication Adapter, version 4.0 for VMware Site Recovery Manager. There are a lot of enhancements in this release and improvements–if you are on 3.1 (or certainly earlier) I recommend an upgrade when you get a chance.
For all the need-to-know information (release notes, user guide, videos, download link, etc.) see here:
Continue reading “SRA 4.0 Released! ActiveDR support”At the time of writing this post we are currently at work on our next release of our Storage Replication Adapter for the FlashArray. In a discussion with a customer who needs the feature that we are adding (what a nice coincidence!) the question came up, “what is the best way to test?”. They want to test the SRA without fouling up their production SRM environment.
So a simple answer is well deploy two new vCenters and a SRM pair. But that requires certain hosts and similar network configuration and authentication, etc. etc. So they wanted to use their existing vCenters but NOT their existing SRM servers.
SRM used to be a fairly rigid tool (for good reason, let’s not break your DR). But in the past few years VMware has really opened it up. Loosened the tight vCenter version to SRM version, shared recovery sites, and multiple SRM pairs per vCenter pair. This is where we come in.
Continue reading “Testing New SRA Release with a 2nd SRM Pair”Now that all of the prerequisites are complete, it is time to start creating protection groups and recovery plans.
This is part 3 of this series, the earlier parts were:
In my last post, I walked through configuring ActiveCluster and your VMware environment to prepare for use in Site Recovery Manager.
Site Recovery Manager and ActiveCluster Part I: Pre-SRM Configuration
In this post, I will walk through configuring Site Recovery Manager itself. There are a few pre-requisites at this point:
Continue reading “Site Recovery Manager and ActiveCluster Part II: Configuring SRM”
About four years ago, we (Pure Storage) released support for our asynchronous replication and Site Recovery Manager by releasing our storage replication adapter. In late 2017, we released our support for active-active synchronous replication called ActiveCluster.
Until SRM 6.1, SRM only supported active-passive replication, so a test failover or a failover would take a copy of the source VMFS (or RDM) on the target array and present it, rescan the ESXi environment, resignature the datastore(s) then register and power-on the VMs in accordance to the SRM recovery plan.
The downside to this of course is that the failover is disruptive–even if there was not actually a disaster that was the impetus for the failover. But this is the nature of active-passive replication.
In SRM 6.1, SRM introduced support for active-active replication. And because this type of replication is fundamentally different–SRM also changed how it behaved to take advantage of what active-active replication offers. Continue reading “Site Recovery Manager and ActiveCluster Part I: Pre-SRM Configuration”
An increasingly common use case for Active-Active replication in vSphere environments is vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) which I wrote about in this paper recently:
This overviews how a stretched vSphere cluster interacts with the active-active replication we offer on the FlashArray called ActiveCluster. Continue reading “Tech Preview: vCenter Site Recovery Manager with ActiveCluster”
The FlashArray Storage Replication Adapter for VMware Site Recovery Manager supports many:many replication since the 2.0 release of the SRA. Use of test failover, failover and reprotect is no different than with 1:1, and nor is the setup of the volumes. The only real difference is how you configure the array managers in SRM. So let’s review how this is done.
Continue reading “Multi-site FlashArray Configuration with Site Recovery Manager”
Hey all. Just wanted to let you know there is an updated Pure Storage FlashArray Storage Replication Adapter now posted on VMware’s Site Recovery Manager compatibility guide:
Continue reading “FlashArray Storage Replication Adapter version 1.5 for SRM”
So we ran into a customer issue recently with VMware Site Recovery Manager that I have not seen before and have not found any on-point articles on, so I thought I’d share this one. Was an insidious one too, when troubleshooting this one I could not find the issue, eventually one of our rockstar escalation engineers at Pure (Jacob Hopkinson) figured it out after going through SRM debug logs line by line. Comes down to case sensitivity in iSCSI IQNs. I’ll explain…
Continue reading “SRM Cannot Identify Replicated Datastores on iSCSI Devices”
Somewhat surprisingly I have been getting a fair amount of questions in the past few months concerning VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager and Raw Device Mappings (RDMs) and using this with Pure Storage. Common question is whether or not we support this (we do) but more commonly it is about how it works. There is a bit of a misunderstanding on how they differ or do not differ from VMFS management in SRM. So figured I would put a post out to explain this. Old topic somewhat, but worth reviewing for those newer SRM customers. Plus, I haven’t found a whole lot of on-point posts anywhere, so why not?
Continue reading “Site Recovery Manager and Raw Device Mappings (RDMs)”