NetApp and VMware SRM

[mikegelhar]

I'm about to implement VMware SRM between two data centers with NetApp storage at both sites. Does anyone have any experience, good or bad, with SRM installation, deployment or configuration that will help me avoid any pitfalls?

[amiller_1]

So....that's a rather big question as involves a lot of moving parts. Some questions to ask (or think about) are...

• NFS, iSCSI, or FCP? That particularly involves overhead needed for SnapMirror (as LUNs requires 2x + delta by default....can do thin provisioning there with lower the fractional reserve but need to understand how thin provisioning works -- fractional reserve, snap auto-delete, volume auto-grow, etc.)
• Licenses -- you need SnapMirror and FlexClone at a minimum.
• VM's on multiple controllers of an active/active pair -- basically not supported. A protection group in SRM can't have VM's with vmdk's on multiple controllers.
• VM's spread between iSCSI and NFS (most common if implementing SnapManager for SQL/Exchange and the data disks live on FC/SAS disk and connected via iSCSI while the OS/swap may live on SATA and connected via NFS).

Some good starting points for reading are....

• http://www.netapp.com/us/communities/tech-ontap/srm-0708.html
• http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualization/2009/11/new-tr3671-netapp-vmware-srm-v4.html

[1jimpross]

The TR-3671 is good.

There is also an excellent SRM 4 doc written by Mike Laverick.  It is called "Administrating VMware Site Recovery Manager 4.0"

http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/vmware-content/the-rtfm-guides/

[igalkatzir]

Hi Mike,

we are on the same point where you started about two years ago, can you shed some light on how was the implementation ???

Did it work well? Did it Work at all?

My main concern is that we need to replicate a 1TB volume from our main site > in Austin to our DR site in California.

The replication (snapmirror rate) is about 11G per hour over a wan acceleration (riverbed) and I worry that it would take to much time to replicate changes. I would prefer having the possibility to replicate ONLY  the relevant guest machines , without changing my current data stores. Does anyone know such tools?

thanks,

Igal

[radek_kubka]

Hi Igal,

How about shipping the DR kit to the primary site & doing baseline replication over LAN? Or, if this isn't feasible, how about a swing filer (3rd box) for baseline transfer from primary to it, then again from swing kit to the DR?

It is hard to beat the bandwidth of the moving truck carrying lots of disks!

Regards,
Radek

[igalkatzir]

You right Radek, moving packets inside a truck might faster than using an ISP pipe but we don't have this pleasure.

I will probably need to use the swing box from the primary filer...

thanks,

Igal

[ralfaro01zero]

You can make a tape based baseline transfer for SnapMirror, look in here: https://communities.netapp.com/thread/18982

Cheers.

[igalkatzir]

might be an option but we do not use tape...

[lmunro_hug]

Would LREP be able to do this to external USB drive? Check the toolchest for the download and documentation.

I am sure I read somewhere that you could get LREP working for snapmirror somehow. Would be interesting to know if it works.

Luke

[radek_kubka]

LREP doesn't support volume SnapMirror.

Here is some trickery how to do the VSM baseline to a USB drive (not supported of course ):

https://forums.netapp.com/message/40587#40587

Regards,
Radek