How to replicate MD3600i ?

As far as I know, this is where Dell has drawn the line in the past with Powervault iSCSI.  No direct san to san replication.

So you are left with host based replications.

We solved this by putting in Datacore Sansymphony-V.....     Now all our storage from several vendors including all our Powervault iSCSI sans sit behind the datacore storage servers creating our own massively HA'd storage cloud.   Pretty darn cool stuff for sure.  All block level, 2 fully independent mirrored storage systems here at HQ, and one down at our DR site.   51TB

Spgsit,

As far as the replication goes on the 3600i there is a Utility called SMrepassist Utility. Below is the link that explains what the utility does and how to use it. It uses a virtual disk copy on a windows system.

support.dell.com/.../OM_en.pdf

Scroll down to pg. 267. I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Thanks, JOHNADCO

What hardware do you run the Sansymphony-V on?

Seb

But NO Windows server touches this array (apart from Veeam baclup in fact)

This is fully ESXi 5 dedicated (with all LUNs accesible only by ESXi hosts)

Seb

Sorry, you assume wrong. The Windows machine does NOT need to be connected to the array to do out-of-bands management

Ofcourse I use MDSM - how could one manage it otherwise?

Seb

If you do not have a Windows box connected to the MD3600i I assume you do not have the MDSM software installed. That is something you may want to look into at least from the management standpoint. Here is the link if you decide to install it. It will have the management tool as well as some other feature that are helpful with this array.

Ok, as far as the replication goes the utility I mentioned is the only utility we have that’s supported on the 3600i which requires a windows system for the virtual disk copy. When you get into the 3600f (Fiber) those system have a replication adapter which allows for other options and features.

Pity, should have really bought something else...

From Dell's current offerings, these systems offer SAN-based replication:

- MD3600F (would have to purchase the license for this on each unit)

- Equallogic (no license required)

- Compellent (not sure if a license would need to be purchased or not)

Dell's EMC offering (discontinued now) offered replication as well on the CX-series and the AX4-5. For this range you needed licenses.

We run datacore Sansymphony-V on modest hardware.  Dell R415's, dual procs lots of cores.    We run strictly iSCSI to it from our ESX hosts and iSCSI from it to our MD3xxxi's.

Amazing storage cloud we have now with all the advanced features of the truly big boy sans.   We run 2 Sansymphony-V storage servers here at HQ in HA.  We run a songle storager server at the data center.  The back end storgae is all MD3xxxi's.

We got great discounting from our reseller on it.  We put the entire storage cloud in for under $29K,  this included licensing for 51TB of storage!!!

Wow!

Johnadco,

Please email me your reseller info - my email is

(replace the _ with dot)

I would like to investigate this solution further.

I am stuck with four of these MD3600i with over 70TB each and VMware SRM does not support SAN Replication for these models.  VMware SAN Replication Adapter 5 only supported on MD3600f and higher end SAN from Dell - something smells very fishy here!

Thank you.

Hello, seems DELL made improvement and with new fw the following licenses are configurable on Dell web page:

License Key, PowerVault MD3 Remote Replication, Snapshot and Virtual Disk Copy license bundle

or just

License Key, PowerVault MD3 Remote Replication

Means the Remote replication should work.

But the problem is that we can't buy another new MD3600i, so the question to DELL is -  what new storage from DELL we can buy to use this Replication capabilities ?

Cheers, Max

hi, I have 2 MD3600i in different locations. the WAN that connects both is 1Gb. I wonder if I could do replication (MD3600i or via VMWare) of the servers at night from site 1 to site 2 (Site 2 is backup site)

I believe MD3600i does NOT have any inbuilt option for replication. If you have you could probably utilize Veeam B&R to do the very thing.

As to Vmware:

vSphere Replication is a feature of Site Recovery Manager (SRM)

kb.vmware.com/.../search.do