Tuesday, January 6, 2015

(Part-4) Step By Step VMware Site Recovery Manager - SRM and EMC SAN with SRDF

In the previous posts we went through Installing and configuring SRM and also installing the EMC Storage SRA and configure the array manager connection,
Now we will go through Creating our first Protection Group which will be based in the Replication Group made by the SAN Admin,
From the SRM Console Go to Protection Group and from the Getting Started tab click on Create a protection Group
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You will ask your self a very basic question here !!
Why all this Datastores is grouped together in one Check Box??
Can I separate this Datastores from each other??
How it will affect my recovery??
The answer is very simple,
For the First question the answer is: All this Datastores Lun`s is grouped in one SRDF Replication Group and because of this you have no choice else protecting them all together in one Protection Group,
For the Second question the answer is: To separate them you need to ask the SAN admin to separate the Replication Group as per your requirements,
For the third question the answer is: Yes it will affect your recovery plan because once you have all this Datastores in one protection group so you will need to recover all of them together,
Choose the Protected Site (HO Site) and you will find the available Array Pairs, choose which array pairs will be used (the one containing your Datastores Lun`s)
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Select your Datastores containing your VM`s and Click Next
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Give a name for the Protection Group and click next
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Review the Summery and Click Next
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Creating and configuring the Protection Group is in Progress
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Once it finished you might notices some minor issues,
some times you attached ISO images to VM`s and after finish installing you forgot to unattache it from the VM,
When protecting the VM you are taking the ISO source with you to the DR site, that’s why you see the following error,
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To solve this issue we will configure the VM on the protected site not to be use the attached ISO image by “Detach” the ISO Image
Right Click the VM and click on Configure Protection
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Select the CD/DVD drive and click on “Detach
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After Fixing all VMs you can see now that the protection group is now Healthy and ready
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Now it’s the time for the final configurations step, Creating the Recovery Plans
To start, From the SRM Console Go to Recovery Plans and from the Getting Started tab click on Create Recovery Plan
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Select your Recovery Site (DR Site) and Click Next
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Select the Protection group you want to use for this Recovery Plan and Click Next
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When you finished your recovery plan you might need to Test your setup and configurations without interrupt the running production environment , Right !!
VMware SRM have its built in mechanism of testing the DR Recovery without interrupt the running production environment by creating isolated network to test you environment on it.
On this step you have two options:
  • Do nothing and leave it to Auto and SRM will create Virtual switch During the Test and auto configure it and connect the VM`s to it
  • Create Testing network environment and configure it with your own security and restriction and select it by click on auto and select your created network
Click Next
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Name the Recovery Plan and Click Next
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Review the Summery and Click Finish
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After Finishing Creating the Recovery Plan we can now test the recovery by running Test recovery
Click Test
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Review Information`s and click Next
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Click Start
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Test In Progress ||||||||||||
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All your VM`s is recovered in a separate network and you can access it from the DR Site,
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Once you finish your test and make sure every thing is ok you can revert back every thing by click on Cleanup
Now we finished installing and configuring VMware Site Recovery Manager using EMC SAN Storage with SRDF replication,
On my next posts Insha`ALLAH I will talk about the Problems I faced during the Implementation and Also I will post about some advanced settings around SRM, Wait for us  Smile

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