Hello and welcome to this unity video covering synchronous block replication. In this video, we will discuss unity's native support for replication. Review the order of operations for synchronous block replication then close with a demonstration and list of additional resources. As technology progresses companies are generating increasing amounts of data and require that data to be easily accessible and highly reliable storage.
And it administrators are also challenged with keeping the 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 concurrent data 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 replication can be configured differently based on tolerance level and transfer speed. Asynchronous replication sets an interval on the order of minutes to hours known as recovery point objective or RPO tracks the change data over that RPO interval and transfers only the modified data to the destination site.
Synchronous replication, transmits host data over a fiber connection to a remote destination site. Before acknowledging the right to the host incoming data is being replicated immediately to the destination. Effectively creating a zero RP solution unity offers native support for asynchronous block and file replication as well as synchronous block replication perform asynchronous replication between storage pools on a single system or between two remote systems. Synchronous replication is performed between two remote systems. Only native support means that no third party tools or appliances are needed to configure and perform replication.
This video covers synchronous block replication. If you are interested in the other forms of native replication, videos are available on EMC online support the process for configuring a synchronous block replication session is as follows. Create replication interfaces on each of your systems. These interfaces will be used to pass replication management operations between the systems for data transfer connect or zone, the first fiber channel port on each system to each other. The port itself will be based on the CNA and IO module configuration on each system. Next, establish a replication connection between the systems.
A replication connection can be established to configure asynchronous replication sessions, synchronous replication sessions or for both asynchronous and synchronous replication sessions. Finally configure replication sessions on existing storage resources or as part of creating a new storage resource. Synchronous block replication is supported between two purpose built unity systems. You can configure replication sessions between the systems in one direction such as from a production site to a backup or in a bidirectional format where storage resources from either side are being replicated to the other Luns, consistency groups and VMWARE VMS data stores are the storage resources supported by synchronous block replication.
Our demonstration will walk through the replication setup and creation process. We will be using two purpose-built unity systems. Our two systems already have storage pools configured and their fiber channel ports have been connected. We will start in unisphere on one of our purpose built unity systems. This system will serve as our source click replication on the left navigation pane. From this page, we will be able to manage all parts of a replication. Begin by clicking interfaces, click the plus button to open the create replication network interface menu for Ethernet port. We will choose the sync replication management port. You will input the IP information for our application 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. Our replication interfaces have already been configured on our other system so we can click the connections tab to create our 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 second unity system. For security purposes, we will enter the administrator password for this unity system. For connection mode, we will select synchronous and click. OK. A job will be started to establish the replication connection between the two systems. Once complete, we can configure a synchronous 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 provision on the system. Click the plus button to open the create Alon wizard. We'll give the line a name and a description and then click next. We will select the storage pool for Harlan, change the size to 125 gigabytes and click next. We will leave the access page alone and click next. We will leave the snapshot page alone and 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 verify the replication mode of synchronous and destination system.
Our other purpose built unity system. Click next, review the summary page with our settings and click finish. This will start a job to create the lun and configure it for replication. Once the job completes, we can close the wizard and review our rep application session. We can review the replication session from two places, the properties page of the lung as well as the replication sessions page. Let's take a look at the former double click the line to open its properties. Click the replication tab here we can see the details of the replication session including the direction of the replication, which side is actively accepting IO and our replication operations including pause, fail over and delete the same information and actions are available on the replication sessions page on an existing line that does not have replication configured.
This page would include a button to configure replication. Clicking this button launches the create a session wizard where the settings for a synchronous block replication session can all be set similar to the replication step in the create Aon wizard. Let's click replication and review our session from that page. The replication 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 other videos titled E MC Unity, Asynchronous block replication and E MC unity asynchronous file replication as well as the white paper titled E MC Unity Replication Technologies. These resources are available from EMC online support.
