Mutliple NetApp SRA's

[MATRIXMATE]

Im trying to get an answer on the following situation.

OS Disks (c: drive) - Running on NFS - (Requries SRA NAS Adapter)

Data Disks (e:, f:) - Running on RDM or Possibly VMFS (Requires SRA SAN Adapter)

Question: Can I have a VM protected via a single proetction group with SRM with the above configuration?, or does it mean any server with a data volume that also requires integration with SRM will have to have its OS Drives on Block Storage as well?

Many thanks in advance..

[MATRIXMATE]

Sorry I forgot to mention, both Volumes (Block and NFS) will be provided by the same NetApp Device

[LukeReed]

As you say, right now there are 2 NetApp SRA adapters. One for SAN (Fibre Channel and iSCSI), and one for NAS (NFS).

As far as I know, SRM can only use one SRA for a given protection group.

Because of this, if you try to configure protection for VMs with C: drives on NFS, and other drives as RDMs or vmdks in VMFS Datastores, you'll get an error that the VM has non-replicated disks (or something like that - it was a few months ago when I tried this).

So basically, you need all disks, for all VMs in the protection group, to come from either all SAN or all NAS Datastores.

[abhinavjoshi · Accepted solution]

Hi,

The NetApp Unified SAN/NAS Adapter 1.4.3 that handles mixed blocks and NFS use case should be availaible in the next couple of weeks.

NetApp recently published a Reference Architecture jointly with VMware and Cisco highlighting VMware SRM for Microsoft Exchange / SQL Server /SharePoint VMs. For the Ethernet based solution, we showcased OS/App binaries on NFS datastores and application data on iSCSI RDM LUNs. I blogged about it here:

http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualization/2010/03/new-solution-guide-disaster-recovery-of-microsoft-exc...

Also, here is a deep dive on leveraging VMware SRM and NetApp for SQL Server VMs. The setup leveraged the new Unified SRA 1.4.3 that should be available in couple of weeks.

http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualization/2010/03/automated-dr-and-advanced-backuprecovery-for-microsof...

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Abhinav Joshi

Reference Architect

NetApp

[MATRIXMATE]

You have made my day, just the news I wanted to hear , what caveats around using the new SRA to do this, does it matter where the different volumes (NFS/LUNs)reside?

[abhinavjoshi]

As long as the vmdks and/or LUNs reside on the same storage controller, it should not be a problem.

Hope this helps.