Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

srm

Update to several SRM SRA’s

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Just noticed that several Storage Replication Adapter’s(SRA) have been updated over the last couple of weeks. For those using one of these specific SRA’s it might be beneficial to update:

  1. EMC RecoverPoint 3.1 Storage Replication Adapter
    Version 1.0.2.1 | Released 03/17/2009
  2. Storage Array Adapter for IBM N-Series
    Version 1.0.1 | Released 03/18/2009
  3. IBM DS4000 / DS5000 Series Storage Replication Adapter
    Version 01.00.35.12 | Released 03/06/2009
  4. NetApp Storage Replication Adapter
    Version 1.0.1 | Released 03/06/2009
  5. HP EVA Storage Replication Adapter
    Version 1.0.1 | Released 02/11/2009
  6. IBM DS8000 Storage Replication Adapter
    Version 1.0.0 | Released 02/13/2009
  7. IBM SVC Storage Replication Adapter
    Version 1.0 | Released 02/13/2009
  8. XP XP Storage Replication Adapter
    Version 1.00.05 | Released 02/02/2009

SRM Patch released

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VMware just released patch 2 for SRM 1.0 Update 1. It’s a cumulative patch that corrects several problems with 1.o Update 1:

  • a problem that prevents protected virtual machines from following recommended Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) settings when recovering to more than one DRS cluster.
  • a problem observed at sites that support more than seven ESX hosts. If you refresh inventory mappings when connected to such a site, the display becomes unresponsive for up to ten minutes. (This problem was also addressed in Patch 1 for SRM 1.0 Update 1.)

Before you apply the patch please backup both SRM server’s / databases.

EMC adds automated failback to SRM

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EMC just announced that they are adding automated failbacks to SRM for their Celerra family via a vCenter plugin. I hope I can see a demo here at VMworld:

VMware Site Recovery Manager Automated Failback via a VMware vCenter plug-in helps Celerra customers coordinate a “failback” to the original virtual infrastructure, including all the process steps once VMware Site Recovery Manager performs a failover. EMC offers the only solution on the market today that arms customers with end-to-end disaster recovery at the simple push of a button.

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.