Ask the Expert: EMC Secure Remote Services (ESRS) – New Release, New Name, New Virtual Edition

ESRS 3.2 Virtual Edition will run on a virtual machine in VMware or Hyper-V.

ESRS is designed to monitor hardware and to provide a means to remote access those arrays in the event of trouble.  It does not currently support software products like NetWorker or DPA.

Can ESRS be deployed using HyperV or KVM ?

Yes, Avamar is supported.  See the Release Notes for all the supported arrays.

Not Networker and DPA, but we can configure Avamar, isnt it?

Hmm. Interesting how phone home has evolved.

For those existing ESRS customers, will EMC drive migration to v3 or this is now customer driven?

May be one day the third platform for IIG stuff

1. Policy Manager still requires a Window machine ok, so how about some HA pairing, for example in my organization we have two physical sites. Each site has a pair of ESRS gateway machines running Win2k8 R2.  If i decided to slowly transition from Win machines to Virtual appliances what are my limitations. Do i have to have each HA pair to be virtual, can one member of HA pair be a Windows machine ? Can i have one HA pair be all virtual appliance and another HA pair still be running on Win2k8 ?
2. This is kind of applies to all EMC appliance solutions (solutions enabler, Unisphere for VMAX).  So you are going to give me an appliance that runs SLES ?  Who is responsible for patching this appliance with the latest security patches (OpenSSL comes to mind) ?
3. What is the migration path from Win solution to virtual appliance. Can i export configuration from a Win box and import into the appliance ? I do not want to deploy brand new VMs, i want to re-use the same IP/DNS names so that i don't have to revisit every single VMAX/Isilon/DD ..etc and point them to new VMs.

Lots of good questions.

1. Policy Manager still requires a Window machine.  We have a version of Policy Manager that runs on Linux, so no Windows servers are required to run ESRS 3.02 Virtual Edition (ESRSVE) or Policy Manager.

2. Do i have to have each HA pair to be virtual, can one member of HA pair be a Windows machine?  Since you cannot cluster an ESRS 2.X Gateway with an ESRS 3.X VE, the cluster must be either ESRS 2.X or ESRS 3.X.

3. Can i have one HA pair be all virtual appliance and another HA pair still be running on Win2k8 ?  Yes, one cluster can be Windows while the other cluster can be VE.

4. So you are going to give me an appliance that runs SLES?  I may have misunderstood your question but ESRSVE runs in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server version 11 (64-bit) SP3.

5. Who is responsible for patching this appliance with the latest security patches (OpenSSL comes to mind)?  The customer is responsible for patching the ESRSVE.  Someone from corporate can chime in here if there are some caveats.

6. Can i export configuration from a Win box and import into the appliance ? Yes, there are a few migration tools that can export the device information from ESRS 2.X and import it into the ESRSVE.

7.  i want to re-use the same IP/DNS names so that i don't have to revisit every single VMAX/Isilon/DD ..etc and point them to new VMs.  EMC will work with you to design a migration procedure where we can split the existing cluster and migrate the device information from ESRS 2.X into a new ESRSVE using the IP address from the existing Windows server.  Then the remaining Windows server can be powered off and the new ESRSVE powered up with that IP address.  Those two servers would then be enrolled in a new cluster and at that point they would be managing all the devices previously managed by the Windows cluster.  Then we would repeat the process with your other cluster.

For Qns 7, if this is a standalone ESRS 2.x GW Server and customer wants to use back the same IP address, how can this be done since the requirements for the migration was to have both the ESRS 2.x and the ESRS VE be both up ?

Not sure why you think it is a requirement that the source (2.x) gateway and target (3.x) gateway be up at the same time.

Very briefly the process is to run the migration tool on the 2.x gateway. This generates an XML file on that gateway. You then have to copy that file to a particular folder on the 3.x gateway. But I'm sure the following process would work..

1. Run migration tool on 2.x gateway

2. Copy XML file to a temporary location on any other server

3. Create the 3.x gateway - if this means that the 2.x gateway must be removed from the network so that you can re-use its IP address that does not matter

4. Copy the XML file to the 3.x gateway

Full details in Appendix A of the Operations Guide.

The use of the Migration Tool is not needed.  You can use the new feature in ServiceLink called Migrate Gateway.

James Williams wrote: Lots of good questions. 1. Policy Manager still requires a Window machine.  We have a version of Policy Manager that runs on Linux, so no Windows servers are required to run ESRS 3.02 Virtual Edition (ESRSVE) or Policy Manager.

James,

Thank you for answering all the questions. I am not clean on the above reply, are you saying i have to have a Windows machine for Policy Manager or you have a Linux alternative now ?

Thank you