SRM with two HP Lefthand P4500 Iscsi SAN

[kappyninewood]

I'm in the middle of setting up SRM with two HP Lefthand P4500's and I have a few questions. I will award points to all answers.  I need to build out the DR site at the Primary location because the MPLS between HQ and DR won't be ready for a month or so.  1) Can I build out the Esxi hosts, DR SAN and configure SRM at the HQ site or should I wait until the MPLS is connected between the two sites? 2) The client is planning to use a 10mbps MPLS between the sites; is that a large enough pipe to do stretched VLANs between the sites? 3) what is the best away to approach my situation?  Finally is there anyone out there that has setup SRM between two HP LH 4500's that can give some advise?

[AureusStone]

Hi hopefully I can help out a bit.

1) I think you should wait until your DR site is ready.  Building up your SRM solution with only one site is just going to create more work for you.  Use this time to creating a good design and work out application dependencies.

2) It really depends.  I presume this is for a small active-passive setup?  In that case as long as you have enough bandwidth for array replication you will be fine.  I can't really say what your requirements are for this.  Normal network traffic will be pretty tiny in an active-passive setup.

Just make sure you read the whitepapers etc.  Also it is important you have spare space on your array at your DR site.  Depending on how your array handles snapshots this may be around 20% free.

I do not have any experience with HP SANs, but as long there is a SRA for this SAN you shouldn't have any problems.

[kappyninewood]

Thank you fornthe advice! I agree that I am going to wait until the link between the two sites is up.  In the mean time I need to build out the second set of Esxi hosts and secondary SAN. Yes, the second SAN will be having a couple LUNs copied to it from the primary site. Should I ask for a totally separate IP range for the DR site even though we will be using stretched VLANs hopefully.  What isnthe advantage\disadvantage of using or not using stretched VLANs?

[dcoz · Accepted solution]

I have setup SRM with the LH P4500.
It is pretty straight forward and a good start would be Mike Lavericks SRM books as these have step by step guides to setting up the LHN P4500 with SRM.

I would use stretched VLANs if you can get it as it will save alot of hassle in the recover of your infrastructure.

If you have any questions you can DM me.

Regards

Dougie

[kappyninewood]

Thanks guys! I appreciate your help! I noticed that the SRM Book by Mike Laverick is referncing the VSA and not the actual P4500, but I'm assuming the steps are exactly the same?

[dcoz]

The steps are exactly the same.

The one thing i noticed with the Lefthand is if you create a Volume on the DR side that is bigger than the available space you get issues, but apart from that the SRM book is a good source of info.

Dougie