I need to do some basic lab testing of Site Recovery Manager, in an effort to get a better handle on it for production deployment. But, in my lab I have only low-end NAS services. I use some basic Linux NFS servers for my small lab.
When trying to set up SRM, I quickly found I needed a NAS/SAN with Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) software. Can anyone recommend low-end options for SRA in a lab environment? Is open source an option? How about a low-end VMware certified SAN device, like the Iomega units?
Yup, go for the HP Lefthand Networks VSA, it's a virtual appliance, uses almost no RAM (384MB if I recall), and you provide the disk space. A couple of those, download the SRA from vmware.com/downloads, follow the Lefthand guide to setup replication and you can have yourself a working SRM lab in a few hours. Last I checked they had downloads for both Workstation and ESX, I've set up labs on both and they worked very well.
Perhaps someone else knows of a different "lab" type solution, but this one has worked for me in the past.
http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storage/software/vsa/index.html
-alex
Yup, go for the HP Lefthand Networks VSA, it's a virtual appliance, uses almost no RAM (384MB if I recall), and you provide the disk space. A couple of those, download the SRA from vmware.com/downloads, follow the Lefthand guide to setup replication and you can have yourself a working SRM lab in a few hours. Last I checked they had downloads for both Workstation and ESX, I've set up labs on both and they worked very well.
Perhaps someone else knows of a different "lab" type solution, but this one has worked for me in the past.
http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storage/software/vsa/index.html
-alex
Hi
An alternative virtual SAN / NAS array is the EMC Celerra VSA - Virtual Server Appliance of our Celerra NAS product
It is fully functioning and can be used in a non-production test and dev capacity to test SRM
It can be found here
http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2008/06/get-yer-celerra.html
A guide to setting up SRM4 on Celerra written by VMware's very own Cormac Hogan can be found here
Have a look at these guides and see if the software is something that would work for you
Regards
Alex Tanner
Thanks for the responses! I will check these virtual SAN options out.