Is file replication from VNX VG2 Gateway to Unity supported?

No, the underlying filesystem moved from UXFS which was 32-bit on the VNXOE for File / DART code base, to 64-bit with UFS64 in Unity.  This allows things like growing/shrinking filesystems, filesystem sizes over 16TB, etc. that customers have been looking for.  A side-effect, however, is that replicator cannot replicate block-level data between the systems.  My company, Datadobi does make Heterogenous file replication software that could do this for you, that is protocol based, meaning SMB and NFS, API integrated with both systems and very fast.  We have quite a bit of experience doing this in a migration context with our DobiMiner / now-called DobiMigrate product.  And now we can also do replication with DobiReplicate. 

Take a look if you're interested in a customer testimonial (TLDR: 1PB in 5 days):

DKFZ Selects DobiReplicate to Replicate Over 1PB of Data on Vimeo

Our Website:

www.datadobi.com

Feel free to reach out or have your DellEMC account team do so if you'd like to discuss this further.

Chris Klosterman

Principal SE, Datadobi

chris.klosterman@datadobi.com

Thanks Chris! Currently we replicate our filesystems from our VG2 to a VNX5700 at our DR site. For the block side of our VNX5700 we use the Recoverpoint splitter. We are looking at what we could possibly replace our VNX5700 with. It will only be used as the landing spot for all of our source replications (file and block) and the Unity array seemed to be a potential candidate for that.

correct - you need file level tools to migrate between ufs32 and ufs64 - like rsync, emcopy, robocopy, ...

or commercial tools like Datadobi

Sure you're most welcome, on the block side, you can do SanCopy push from VNX to Unity, but I don't know if that's an option with a VG2 as the source (probably depends on what the underlying storage subsystem is).  CirrusData also makes a nice appliance for block work like this called DMS.  They, like us, are a DellEMC partner.  On the file side if you choose a commercial product like ours that's protocol based (SMB+CIFS)/NFS then your target options are pretty wide open.  It could be also Isilon for instance, the architecture need not be the same as long as the datasets are single protocol.  So perhaps you pick something that is cheaper per TB than your production system; because in a true DR event performance is rarely as important as simply being back online.

Just my thoughts on the kind of flexibility a heterogeneous DR approach can give you.  (and of course cost savings as well)

~Chris

We have dobiminer and will use that for the file migration part if we decide to go with something new. That has been a great application to use for our past migrations.