Protection Manager, VSM, and multistore

[joec]

Does protection manager support mirroring volumes that are contained within vfilers ?

How about protecting the vfiler as a whole ( including vfiler root and vfiler/etc ?) Does prot-mgr integrate with vfiler migrate ?

[smoot · Accepted solution]

Yes, Protection Manager can protect volumes or qtrees assigned to a vfiler.  You can also add a vfiler to a dataset and we'll automatically protect all data assigned to that vfiler.

The 3.7 release does not support "vfiler migrate" or  vfiler DR.  Support for vfiler migration in Provisioning Manager is under development for an upcoming release.

[joec]

So I should be able to add a 'primary' vfiler and all of it's volume resources to a data set.

Then I could create a secondary vfiler with the same size and number of volumes as the primary, and make it my resouce pool.

Then assign a policy and schedule and say protect now.

In the event the primary vfiler went down, I could always assign the original ip address to the secondary vfiler ( subnets, AD domains, and DNS tree spans both data centers ), break the snapmirror relationships, and conduct business as normal on my secondary vfiler. ( or just change DNS to point to the new ip )

Or I could skip protection manager all together and use vfiler dr.

Agree ?

[jimholl]

So I should be able to add a 'primary' vfiler and all of it's volume resources to a data set.

Yes

Then I could create a secondary vfiler with the same size and number of volumes as the primary, and

make it my resouce pool.

Then assign a policy and schedule and say protect now.

Not quite, you explicitly add the manually provisioned volumes to the secondary node of the dataset. You cannot add a vfiler or volume to a resource pool.

In the event the primary vfiler went down, I could always assign the original ip address to the

secondary vfiler ( subnets, AD domains, and DNS tree spans both data centers ), break the

snapmirror relationships, and conduct business as normal on my secondary vfiler. ( or just change

DNS to point to the new ip )

DFM 3.7 introduces a "DR failover" feature to help automate some of the process, like breaking all the mirrors and setting up exports.

Or I could skip protection manager all together and use vfiler dr.

Agree ?

Yes

By the way, running vfiler migrate outside of Protection Manager is not transparent to Protection Manager. In DFM 3.8, the Provisioning Manager product will introduce support for vfiler migration and it is integrated with Protection Manager.

Jim

[scottgelb]

Thank you for the correction on vfiler migrate not being transparent.  Are there hooks into vfiler0 for some of the vfiler information that make it non-transparent?

[jimholl]

Are there hooks into vfiler0 for some of the vfiler information that make it non-transparent?

Protection Manager only talks to physical filers, never vfilers.

Jim

[scottgelb]

With Operations Manager 3.7, there is a wizard for setting up vfiler units, so a vfiler unit can be a resource pool. So, protection manager supports volumes in vfilers including the root volume. I would do a vfiler status -a and confirm all volumes in the vfiler are in the protection policy.  Provisioning Manager can also create a vfiler and use templates for creation, but I haven't seen any support for either vfiler migrate or vfiler dr from Protection Manager.  Although running them outside of protection manager should be fine...migrate with the same ip will be independent of protection manager and will keep running.  vfiler dr however could require a change of the protection manager configuration if the goal is to keep protection manager management at the d.r. site.