New to SRM, question about NFS storage management

[somecallmemike]

We currently host an application across a number of virtual servers that uses an NFS export from a NetApp NAS as it's storage, which is hosted in our primary data center.  We are planning to deploy another NetApp in our secondary data center and setup replication with SRM, but we are not sure if SRM is capable of managing the failover of the NFS export.  Note this NFS export is being mounted directly to the guest virtual machines and is not participating in hosting any kind of VMware data stores.  We know that we could migrate the storage from the NAS to a virtual disk and SRM would support it just fine, but it's quite a few terabytes and we really don't want to manage the growth of this storage in block format (growing an NFS export in a NetApp is two or three clicks).  Is it possible for SRM to manage a NFS export that has nothing to do with VMware datastores?  (Also if it's not supported with our current equipment, is there any vendor that does support this?)

[mal_michael]

Hi,

SRM has no knowledge of storage accessed directly from within guest OS.

You will need to manage the replication separately from SRM via array management tools, and manually / by script mount them to guests upon failover.

Still SRM can help you to failover vmfs / nfs datastores on which VMs' vmdks reside, present LUNs, register and re-IP VMs at the recovery site. You will be able to define VMs priorities, perform failover tests (can be a challenge if you need to access those nfs exports).

By the way, SRM fully supports RDMs, just in case you think of moving from in-guest nfs access.

Michael.

[somecallmemike]

Thanks for the clarification, we figured that SRM had no knowledge of our NFS export, but were hopefull it might be possible.  We are not fond of the idea of moving to RDMs or any kind of block storage as it's a nightmare to manage growth of the storage without using thin provisioning.