Hello and welcome to this unity video covering asynchronous block replication. In this video, we will discuss unity's native support for replication. Review the odor of operations for asynchronous block replication. Then close with a demonstration and list of additional resources storage and it administrators can be challenged with keeping their data available in the face of natural disasters, power loss and network failures, losing access to a loner file system is simply not an option to this end data replication is an adequate solution for storing data concurrently across locations.
For example, a disaster recovery site can be set up a distance away from the production data center. So disaster scenarios can be survived by the recovery site. Asynchronous replication sets an interval on the order of minutes to hours known as the recovery point objective or RPO tracks the change data over that RP interval and transfers only the modified data to the destination site. There is also the option to configure a manual replication session where data is only sent to the destination. When the user runs a sync asynchronous replication leverages Unity's unified snapshots technology for tracking changes to the source resource between sync intervals. When our application session is established.
Two system snapshots are created on the source and destination storage resources. You will see these snapshots in unisphere but they are not user modifiable and do not count towards snapshot limits. The snapshots are refreshed and updated during each RPO interval to keep the source and destination resources in sync unity offers native support for asynchronous block replication. Perform asynchronous replication between storage pools on a single system or between two remote systems. Native support means that no third party tools or appliances are needed to configure and perform replication. This video covers asynchronous block replication. If you are interested in the other forms of native replication on unity.
Additional references are available on E MC online support and will be covered at the end of this video configuring a replication session involves the following steps, create replication interfaces on your systems. These interfaces are used for communication between your two systems, establish a replication connection between the systems. A replication connection enables replication sessions to be created between the two systems. Replication connections can be established between systems in asynchronous synchronous or both asynchronous and synchronous mode.
Finally configure replication sessions on existing storage resources or as part of creating a new storage resource. Asynchronous block replication is supported between purpose built unity systems unity vs A systems. VNXE 3200 systems and VNXE 1600 systems. Asynchronous block replication can be configured on the following block resources, Luns consistency groups and VM ware VMFS data stores our demonstration will walk through the replication setup and creation process. We will be using a purpose built unity system and a unity VSA our two systems already have storage pools configured. We will start in unisphere of our purpose built unity system on the main dashboard, click replication on the left navigation pane.
From this page, we will be able to manage all parts of our application. Begin by clicking interfaces, click the plus button to open the create replication network interface menu. We will input the IP information for our replication interfaces. Click OK. And wait for the interfaces to be created. The interfaces have been created successfully and are now listed on the interfaces page. A replication interface has already been configured on our unity VS A. So we can click the connections tab to create a replication connection, click the plus button to open the create replication connection menu. We will input the management IP and log in information for our unity VSA system. For security purposes, we'll enter the administrator password for this purpose built unity system. For connection mode.
We will keep it as asynchronous and click. OK. A job will be started to establish the replication connection between the two systems. Once complete, we can configure an asynchronous block replication session. Let's create a new line and configure it to be replicated click block on the left navigation pane. We are brought to the Luns page where we will see the Luns provisioned on the system. Click the plus button to open the create Alon wizard. We'll give the London a name and a description and then click next. We will select a storage pool for our lun. We will change the size to 50 gigabytes and then click next, we will leave the access page alone and click next. We will leave the snapshot page alone and then click next here.
We have the replication step where we can enable replication on the system. Click the check box and notice the grayout options become selectable from here. We can specify the replication mode RP and destination. We'll change the RP to 30 minutes. Click next, review the summary page with our settings and click finish. This will start a job to create the lu and configure it for replication. Once the job completes, we can close the wizard and review our replication session. We can view the replication session from two places, the properties page of the as well as the replication sessions page.
Let's start with the former double click the lun to open its properties. Click the replication tab here we can see the details of the replication session including the direction of replication which side is actively accepting IO and our replication operations including pause, sync, fail over with sync and delete. Note that only the applicable replication operations for the given system and resource are available preventing you from executing an invalid action. If this one was created but replication was not configured. This page would include a button to configure application.
Clicking this button launches the create a session wizard with the replication mode rpo and destination can all be set similar to the replication step in the create Alon wizard. Let's click replication and review our session from that page. The application session is listed on the screen, double, click it to view its properties. As you can see it resembles the look of the replication tab in the lun properties page. Click close, click the more actions button to find the replication operations that can be run on this session. This concludes the demonstration for more information about replication on unity.
Please refer to the videos titled E MC unity, asynchronous file replication and E MC unity synchronous block replication as well as the white paper titled E MC Unity Replication Technologies. These resources are available from EMC online support.
