SRM between primary NFS/FC SAN and DR NFS SAN

[daniel_kaiser]

I'm reading through TR-3671 but wasn't quite sure if it's possible to do the whole DR thing with SRM/SRA+Snapmirror between our primary site, which has Vmware and clustered 3140 all running over both FC and NFS, and a DR site that we're planning to setup in the near future.  Due to budgetary reasons, we're looking to deploy Vmware and clustered 2040 all running over NFS.  Thanks.

Dan

[luker · Accepted solution]

Can I check if I understand...you're asking if it's possible to have:

VMs on Fibre Channel attached LUNs in your primary site, replicated to your DR site, where they appear in NFS datastores

Is that right?

AFAIK This isn't possible today.

Using SnapMirror, when you replicate a volume containing a LUN, you get a volume containing a LUN at the DR site (and your virtual machine files are stored inside the LUN).

However, with NFS, virtual machine files are stored directly on the volume - there's no LUN involved.

I've heard of a few customers who use Fibre Channel in their primary site and iSCSI in their DR site - this might be a better option for you, and it shouldn't affect your budget too much, since it sounds like you're putting in an IP network for NFS in your DR site already?

This is pretty simple to setup - you just need to configure the iSCSI software initiator on the DR site ESX servers, and create initiator groups for your ESX server's iSCSI software initiators on the 2040 in your DR site.

SRM with the NetApp SRA will take care of mapping the replicated LUNs to the igroups when you perform a failover or test failover.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

Luke.