Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

BC-DR

SRM and rescanning your storage twice

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I just got off the phone with a former colleague. He was implementing SRM at a customer site and couldn’t get it working correctly because the VMFS volumes weren’t discovered at the recovery site. As most of you know sometimes you need to rescan your HBA’s twice before the LUNs and orVMFS volumes are discovered. When using SRM the rescan only occurs once by default. Fortunately this is a setting that can be changed in the vmware-dr.xml file:

To enable the additional rescan, edit the vmware-dr.xml file at both the protected and recovery sites to add a <hostRescanRepeatCnt> element within the <SanProvider> element. Set the value of <hostRescanRepeatCnt> to 2, as shown in the following example:
<SanProvider>
.
.
.
<hostRescanRepeatCnt>2</hostRescanRepeatCnt>
</SanProvider>

If you are doing SRM implementations it might be useful to write this one down… Especially when combined with HP EVA’s.

Veeam Backup 3.0 supports ESXi, including free version!

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Veeam just released Backup 3.0 with ESXi(including the Free version) support:

In addition to the ESXi backup through VCB that was introduced with version 2.0, Veeam Backup 3.0 now supports ESXi backup without VCB. Veeam Backup is the only VMware backup solution that lets you backup and restore virtual machines running on all existing editions of ESXi, including ESXi free.

Now head over to Veeam and download your trial and start doing full VM backups. Veaam Backup also provides you with a file level restore:

Veeam’s fast file-level recovery feature allows you to restore individual files from your image-level backups and replicas in seconds, without having to extract the full VM image to your local drive.

Just a tip, I would suggest to do a “zero-out” before running the full VM backup!

VMware HA or VMware SRM, what should I use?

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I was just reading up on VMTN and noticed this great topic. For some reason there are a lot of people that don’t see the difference between HA and SRM. I suggest reading the full topic and especially Jay Judkowitz’s replies and Smoggy’s reply, both are Subject Matter Experts on SRM and explained the topic starter what the differences are and when to use it. Here’s an outtake of the discussion which captures the essence of the answer in my opinion:

  • With SRM, you get a much more well defined failover.
    • The VMs start in a specified order
    • You can set some VMs to be started serially with others starting in parallel
    • You can designate VMs at the recovery site to suspend to make room for recovery VMs
    • You can have callout scripts and predefined breakpoints to make sure that critical non-VMware activity is done at the right time and place
    • You can set the resource pool at the remote site (with the same size or different as the source resource pool) so that you get a predictable and defined QOS on CPU and memory
  • Once you have that well defined failover plan, you can test it and audit the results
    • Testing will automatically snap the recovery LUNs so you can power on the recovery VMs without interrupting replication
    • You can specify a test network at the second site that SRM will automatically put the recovery VMs on during a test so that they do not interfere with the running VMs
    • You can therefore do non-disruptive DR testing any time without warning. The recovery plan executes the same as for failover, but in a “test bubble” where storage and network IO are safely segregated away from production work.
    • There is a test results page for the recovery plan which lists all test runs, how long they took and how successful they were. From this page, you can drill down to each test run and see exactly what steps succeeded and failed and how long they took to run.
    • With the history page, you can grade your organization over time. With the detailed reports, you can troubleshoot specific runs.

I suggest that if you’re looking into Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery and you’ve got questiosn on what/where/when/how with SRM you visit the VMTN forums… these guys really know what they are talking about and can really help you understanding what BC/DR is about.

New vCenter add-on announced: vCenter Heartbeat

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VMware just announced a new add-on for vCenter:

Source
As customers expand their use of VMware, maintaining a highly available management infrastructure is quickly becoming a key requirement. Learn about VMware’s new availability solution for vCenter Server and how it expands infrastructure and services sales opportunities.

The title of the webex is “Introducing VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat”

In other words, there’s an add on coming up that provides high availability for your vCenter Server. We will have to wait until tomorrow before more details are announced!

I just also noticed that there will be a session at VMworld Europe on vCenter Server Heartbeat:

DC10 – Chosing a Solution for vCenter Server Availability (by David Friedlander VMware Product Manager)

Blades and HA / Cluster design

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After reading Aaron‘s excellent articles(1, 2) on Scott Lowe’s Blog I remembered a discussion I had with a couple of co-workers. The discussion was about VMware HA Cluster design in Blade Environments.

The thing that started this discussing was an HA “problem” that occurred at a customer site. This specific customer had 2 Blade chassis to avoid a single point of failure in his virtual environment. All blade servers were joined in one big cluster to get the most out of the environment in terms of Distributed Resource Scheduling.

Unfortunately for this customer at one point in time one of his blade chassis failed. In other words, power off on the chassis, all blades gone at the same time. The firs thing that comes to mind is: HA will kick in and the VM’s will be up and running within no-time.  [Read more…] about Blades and HA / Cluster design