Cl3gh0rn

So Im doing an SRM installation at the moment on an IBM DS4800.

We have hit a couple of snags along the way, one of which looks like flashcopy isnt set up to allow the Test Run of the Recovery Plan (fire drill) LUN snaps to be dynamically created.

The SRA and SRM installations went pretty much according to the VMware Documentation, apart from the fact that you have to restart the services every so often. Do this after installing SRM on both sites and prior to configuring the Storage Arrays.

Anyway, the major problem was as per the IBM SMSRA 01.00.x5.12 Readme excerpt:

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4. Known Issues
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4.2 Testing a recovery plan currently requires an unused physical disk for each Flashcopy. A Flashcopy is created for each protection group specified in a recovery plan. SRA will continue creating Flashcopies until it runs out of disks, at which point error messages are generated - "Message exceeds database maximum string length".
Workaround - Only test with as many protection groups at a time as there are free disks. This restriction will be lifted in the next SRA release.

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You must create a physical disk on each subsystem (for each Protection Group!) to allow for the creation of FlashCopy disks as part of the SRA API's interoperability with the Storage Processors.

Note: This process employs IBM FlashCopy technology which must be configured on your DS4800 Storage Subsystem.

So on your enclosure you have to have a free disk which is not a member of an array. This might be your HotSpare disk(s). You can return them to being Hotspares easily via Storage Manager after you have successfully completed your Test Recovery Plan.