- Notes, cautions, and warnings
- Preface
- Introduction
- Disaster recovery
- High availability
- Data migration
- SRDF I/O operations
- SRDF write operations
- SRDF read operations
- SRDF/A resilience and performance features
- Management tools
- More information
Dell SRDF Introduction
Remote replication in a vVols environment
PowerMaxOS 10 (6079) and PowerMaxOS 5978.669.669, and later, can remotely replicate vVols using SRDF/A. This diagram shows the architecture of a replicated vVol environment.
As the diagram shows, there is one extra component in this environment: VMWare Site Recovery Manager (or SRM). SRM is a disaster recovery product that orchestrates the failover and failback operations between the production environment and the disaster recovery environment. The vSphere administrator uses SRM to manage the failover and failback of vVols. As with other SRDF configurations failover, and the subsequent failback, can be both planned and unplanned.
Establish the replication configuration
Both the storage administrator and the vSphere administrator are involved in establishing a replication configuration.
The storage administrator:
- Creates the Storage Containers and Storage Resources on the production environment
- Provisions Protocol Endpoints for each ESXi host that uses the array
- Creates Storage Containers on the disaster recovery environment
- Creates Replication Groups that contain Storage Containers on both the production and disaster recovery environments
This step includes selecting SRDF/A as the communications protocol.
Once the storage administrator has set up the replication configuration at the two sites, the vSphere administrator:
- Registers the VASA Provider
- Creates vVols in the Storage Resources on the production environment
- Sets up Storage Resource Policies
These policies define which vVols are replicated to the disaster recovery environment. The policies also define whether point-in-time copies of vVols are made and how frequently the copies are taken.
- When necessary, uses SRM to carry out failover and failback operations between the production and disaster recovery sites
The vSphere administrator defines the replication services that are necessary. The storage array provides those services.
Requirements
Remote replication of a vVol environment requires specific versions of several software components on both the storage array and in the ESXi environment.
Storage array:
- PowerMaxOS 10 (6079) or PowerMaxOS 5978.669.669, and later
- Solutions Enabler Version 9.2, and later
- Unisphere for PowerMax Version 9.2, and later
ESXi environment:
- vSphere Version 7.0 and later
- SRM Version 8.3
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