I'm looking for anyone who's using the EMC RecoverPoint appliances for the array based replication in a VMWare 5.x environment.

 

Recently we went through an update of our VNX5700 that we use with VSphere 5.1.  As part of the upgrade, we purchased two of the RecoverPoint appliances to replicate the LUNS/datastores to our D/R facility (another 5700).  Previously, we used the MirrorView product but went with the appliances to reduce the load on the VNX processors.

We have about 18 hosts at the primary site, all sharing a group of 19 datastores (each datastore is in its own LUN).   this will be growing in the future, both the number of hosts and the number of LUNs.

When the reseller (not EMC) did the initial configuration, he said that since all the hosts see all 19 datastores, all the LUNS had to be in a single consistency group..

The problem we're seeing with this is that when we need to add a new LUN, when we add it to the consistency group, we basically lose the replicas at the remote site until the new lun is replicated.

In almost all cases a given VM is all on the same LUN; we typically don't split VM's over multiple datastores.  I could understand keeping all the VMDK's of a VM in the same consistency group, but do we really need all LUNS that all the VMWare hosts see to be in the same consistency group?

 

Is there a problem if we create a number of smaller consistency groups, as long as we don't have VM's "span" across different groups?

We have VMWare SRM for our D/R site, but we're still in the process of setting it up and  hadn't gone live with it, and haven't reconfigured it since we changed from MirrorView to RecoverPoint.

Any comments would be appreciated.