Why do we need the documentation?

 

I spent years in IT industry in most days and in most Modern companies I found that they consider the documentation a burden not a solution for their problems .

Some of the reasons I had seen to avoid Making or updating the documentation :

• understaffed and lack the Time .
• lack of well ( no one will read it ) .
• lack the intention ( if some one know what I know I will be fired ) .
• I am the only one who do it anyway why should I document I can remember everything .

Return On Investment–ROI for a Small Private Cloud project

 

This is one of the Most common words in IT industry you keep hearing ,ROI study and ROI for this project . in this Short post I will try to make it simple by using example from the IT industry not just by using the raw info .

it’s a performance measure to determine the efficiency

Example :

you want a new servers for building a new private cloud used as a sandbox (Testing) .

Step 1: getting the cost of Accruing those servers ( servers cost + software licenses cost + cost of implementing those ) you will end up with a number (Ex. $100,000 )

Private Cloud Higher utilization and additional unit Marginal cost/ benefit

 

Example

you need to run 10 applications (LOB) shall you proceed with Private cloud ?

(the servers cost is used as example only )

each physical server costs $15K (16GB Ram ,6Cores , 1TB Storage )

Now you sum up to 150K

Now we got to the cloud part by using the cloud you removed the physical boundaries with will lead to Higher utilization (I am using the same HW in the physical example)

(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

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)

(Part-3) Step By Step VMware Site Recovery Manager - SRM and EMC SAN with SRDF

Before we can step forward to the next step which will be Configuring the Array Manager we need to install and configure the Storage Replication Adapter (SRA)
Our SAN is EMC and the replication software used is SRDF so we need to login to myvmware we site and download the SRA Adapter and install in both Sites SRM VM`s

Locate the Source, Double Click, you will get the following Error

In order to install the SRA you need first to install EMC Solution Enabler 32 bit(X86)
Take Care: Don’t use the 64 bit Version as it’s the version to be used by the SAN Admin on his Array controller Server
The 32 bit version is only a library so SRM can understand and communicate with the SAN Array Manager commands

(Part-2) Step By Step VMware Site Recovery Manager - SRM and EMC SAN with SRDF

In Part-1 we covered the installation and basic configurations of VMware Site Recovery Manager:
(Part-1) SRM Installation
Now we will start configuring our SRM with the Inventory Mapping (Resources, Folders, Network and Placeholder Data-Stores)
Don’t forget that we must create the inventory mappings so that SRM can create placeholder VMs
After configuring mappings at the protected site (HO Datacenter) we will need to configure inventory mappings at the recovery site to enable the re-protect, we will discuss the re-protect on another post.

Lets start by Resources Mapping by mapping Hosts or Clusters,
Note that you can map two clusters in Main Datacenter to one cluster in DR as per your design or business needs, Also you might escape cluster mapping and its VM`s from being protected to DR
You will need to configure mapping of the vCenter, Clusters and Hosts (if you don’t have Clusters)
Right Click on the Resource and Click Configure Mapping

(Part-1) Step By Step VMware Site Recovery Manager - SRM and EMC SAN with SRDF

Before we step forward in installing and configuring the VMware Site Recovery Manager we need to have a vSphere Environment in two Sites (HO Site) and (DR Site)
I already covered this part in two Blog Posts:
Install vCenter 5.5 in two Sites with Multiple SSO and Linked Mode (Part 1)
Install vCenter 5.5 in two Sites with Multiple SSO and Linked Mode (Part 2)
After Having both vCenter in both sites we will start our first step of SRM Installation by:

• Deploying 2 Virtual machines (One on Each Site) to be used as the SRM Server
• Create a DB to be used for the SRM using the same SQL Server deployed with the vCenter or any SQL Located on Each Environment (More details about the DB requirements will discussed later)

After this point we can start deploying our SRM in both sites and the installation will be the same in both sites,

So,, Lets Start with first step, download the SRM Source to the SRM Machine and Double Click to start

Installation Started ,,