MetroCluster Plugin for vSphere - Release 1.0 Announcement & Request for Feedback

[strick]

Hello,

I am the product manager for NetApp's MetroCluster Plugin for vSphere. In June we launched version 1.0 after many customers requested a simple, NetApp supported, disaster recovery method for virtualization workloads using MetroCluster storage. Attached is the customer product communication that announced the release. If you use MetroCluster in your VM environment I would appreciate hearing any feedback or questions you may have about this new management tool.

Sincerely,

Patrick Strick

Product Manager, Virtualization Integrations

NetApp

[EDDIEPHOENIX]

Neat utility, I set it up a few weeks ago, but thankfully haven't needed it since i installed it. The week before might have been handy though.

I get my next maintenance window in about 3 weeks, I will give this a shot and see how it stacks up.

One question:

Why is this not part of VSC?

[strick]

Hi EDDIEPHOENIX,

Thanks for checking it out and for your comments.

It could be added into VSC at some point, but we had enough customer demand that we wanted to get it out sooner rather than later. A stand-alone release is also simpler to adjust as we get customer feedback, and one of the goals of this release is to learn how customers use this type of tool.

I'm looking forward to hearing about your experience with it during your maintenance.

[RICHARDLOCK]

Thanks for the utility.  Some feedback:

It would be nice to be able to view overall status/information for the MetroCluster in the vSphere Client rather than only being able to see information for one VMware cluster at a time.

It would also be good to have some detail available in the utility to quickly see the mirror status for aggregates.  This could be an advanced option to display some of the information that would be available via the command line when checking MetroCluster status (some kind of summary of "aggr status" for example).

Also, it would be good to have some kind of check connected with DRS groups to be able to manage site affinity for VMs.  I've had to write a set of PowerShell modules to check which VMs are located on storage on each MetroCluster controller and then populate DRS groups to make sure that VMs should normally run at the site that hosts their storage.  The VMs will only run on vSphere hosts at the other site following a site failure.  I can share these scripts to explain the logic behind the site affinity.

Kind regards, Richard

[strick]

Hi Richard,

Thanks for the feedback, and I apologize for taking so long to get back to you. One of our TMEs worked on a PowerShell script to do something similar (set the affinity group), but also tied in with SRM. If you would like to post your script to this thread, I would be interested in seeing it, and it others may find it helpful as well.

[RICHARDLOCK]

Hi Strick,

I've finally got round to uploading the MetroCluster DRS Group PowerShell cmdlets to GitHub, so please check out the code on here if it might still be useful:

https://github.com/richardlock/powershell-vmwarevsphere/

The main cmdlet is "Update-ClusterVMDrsGroups", which relies on some code from Luc Dekens which I have modified slightly (Add-VMToDrsGroup, Get-DrsGroup, Remove-VMFromDrsGroup).

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Richard