Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for 30 January, 2009

EMC SRDF Storage Replication Adapter

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I was delivering a Site Recovery Manager Jumpstart today. During the configuration of the Storage Replication Adapter(SRA) the task got stuck at 23%. I’ve seen the configuration of the SRA get stuck once before at 23% so I knew it was the “DiscoverLuns” command that failed for one reason or the other.

We ran the configuration of the SRA again and it stopped after exactly five minutes. We decided to run the DiscoverLuns task again but this time manual with use of command.pl and a xml file as input. If you read the previous article on DiscoverLuns you know how to feed command.pl with the xml file and what info the file should contain.

Running the DiscoverLuns manually worked great, but it actually took little over 15 minutes to complete before the complete results were returned by the EMC DMX3. During the configuration via the GUI the task failed after exactly 5 minutes, so it seemed to time-out. Opening up vmware-dr.xml, which can be found in the Site Recovery Manager installation folder, revealed a time out of 300 seconds:

<CommandTimeout>300</CommandTimeout>

We changed the value to 1800, restarted the SRM service and reconfigured the SRA successful.

Balancing LUN paths with powershell

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Just noticed this pingback. The topic title “Balancing LUN paths on your ESX hosts with powershell” sounded promising so I headed over. Justin Emerson is the owner of the blog and he wrote a short but effective script that changes the active paths on your active/active SAN(FIXED).

After watching this video that was posted by the VI Toolkit team, I immediately thought of this script that was posted quite a while back on Yellow Bricks. I decided to try to recreate this script in PowerShell, and while I was at it expand it so it would modify all nodes in a cluster at once. As such I wrote the following script. Please feel free to give feedback or make modifications! You can download it from my Sky Drive or check it out here.

Head over to Justin’s site, pick up the script and give it a try… and most importantly give Justin feedback on the results and what could be improved!