Using WFA to provide Protection Manager functionality

buxton · ‎2014-02-07

Hi All,

I have a customer that we are in a tender situation with at the moment. They are an existing 7 mode customer and we are proposing cDOT. They've done quite a bit of work with integrating some of the Snapmanagers with Protection Manager, we've positioned WFA moving forward to replace that functionality. They're interested in how that would work.

Can the SnapManagers integrate with WFA? I'm thinking schedule snapshots with SM and get WFA to take the consistent snapshot and replicate it? Is there a workflow you could build to automate that?

Could you build a workflow to automatically failover a SVM to the DR site?

How does OCUM integration work? There is a bit in one of the presentations about WFA integration for Protection support but I'm not clear how this works.

Is WFA all Powershell back end, or does it use API's?

Thanks for any help!

abhit · ‎2014-02-07

Can the SnapManagers integrate with WFA? I'm thinking schedule snapshots with SM and get WFA to take the consistent snapshot and replicate it? Is there a workflow you could build to automate that?

Could you build a workflow to automatically failover a SVM to the DR site?

[Abhi] You can always create a custom workflow to do the same.

How does OCUM integration work? There is a bit in one of the presentations about WFA integration for Protection support but I'm not clear how this works.

[Abhi] OCUM-WFA integration is done in OCUM 6.1 and WFA2.2. OCUM 6.1 will be out soon.

Is WFA all Powershell back end, or does it use API's?

[Abhi] Powershell, Perl or you can use the APIs directly via NMSDK.

Regards

Abhi

adaikkap · ‎2014-02-07

Hi,

Today we have Snapcreator integrated with WFA, and here you cam find the workflows for the same.

https://communities.netapp.com/docs/DOC-27317#comment-18122.

Could you build a workflow to automatically failover a SVM to the DR site?

Yes, there are customers already building it. I am sure some one will soon share the same.

How does OCUM integration work? There is a bit in one of the presentations about WFA integration for Protection support but I'm not clear how this works.

With OCUM 6.1( soon to be released) & WFA 2.2 (which is already released), you can invoke, WFA workflows to setup snapmirror and snapvault, and do all kinds of active management using the same.

Also we use OCUM as a cache data source for WFA.

Is WFA all Powershell back end, or does it use API's?

We use powershell commandlets which in turn use NMSDK. We have Perl based commands as well.

Hope this helps.

Regards

adai

nthakur · ‎2014-02-07

> Can the SnapManagers integrate with WFA? I'm thinking schedule snapshots with SM and get WFA to take the consistent snapshot and replicate it? Is there a workflow you could build to automate that?

As Adai mentioned, SnapCreator is definitely worth a look. In addition, you should look at the sample workflows in WFA (2.1 or newer) that create SnapMirror or SnapVault relationships in CDoT.

CDoT vault can transfer app consistent snapshots on a schedule so you don't have to drive the updates externally. Some of the SnapManagers have well known "labels" that they apply to the app-consistent local snapshots. You can create a policy in CDoT to periodically move the labeled snapshots to the Vault. WFA has a sample workflow called "Create Schedules and Policies" that creates policies for couple of snapmanagers (SMHV, SMSQL) with appropriate labels. This facilitates a loose integration between those two SnapManagers and WFA.

Thanks,

neelesh