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hccwf88
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Understanding SRA's

We are configuring SRM to integrate with our SAN.  Our SRM servers are currently on a 300GB LUN each at our protected and recovery sites.  I would like to get a better understanding of configuring the SRA.  Can anyone point me in the right direction for this?  We are running Vsphere 5.5 and SRM 5.8.

A couple of specific questions that I had are:

Can the placeholder datastores be on the same LUN where the SRM server is running?

What configuration is involved with the SRA and the SAN itself?  I don't want to disturb any production boxes' storage so how can I insure that what I am testing is only LUNs attached to our dev boxes?  Is that all determined by what virtual machines are added to protection groups in SRM?

In other words, will VM's and their associated SAN storage be affected in anyway if they are NOT added to protection groups or anything to do with SRM?

Hope that makes sense.

Thanks.

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rcporto
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We are configuring SRM to integrate with our SAN.  Our SRM servers are currently on a 300GB LUN each at our protected and recovery sites.  I would like to get a better understanding of configuring the SRA.  Can anyone point me in the right direction for this?  We are running Vsphere 5.5 and SRM 5.8.

You should consult your storage array vendor documentation to know how to configuring the SRA. What is your storage arrays vendor ?

Can the placeholder datastores be on the same LUN where the SRM server is running?

Yes, but I prefer and recommend a dedicated a datastore just for placeholder and it can be a small datastore depending of your environment size.

What configuration is involved with the SRA and the SAN itself?  I don't want to disturb any production boxes' storage so how can I insure that what I am testing is only LUNs attached to our dev boxes?  Is that all determined by what virtual machines are added to protection groups in SRM?

Just make sure that you have create protection group only with LUNs from dev boxes and that any production virtual machine is stored on dev boxes.

In other words, will VM's and their associated SAN storage be affected in anyway if they are NOT added to protection groups or anything to do with SRM?

VMs outside a protection group will not be affected and VMs inside a protection group will only be "affected" if you run a SRM failover, remember that you can always use the "Test Failover" option to see if things is working and no left original virtual machines running.

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Richardson Porto
Senior Infrastructure Specialist
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/richardsonporto
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hccwf88
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What configuration is involved with the SRA and the SAN itself?  I don't want to disturb any production boxes' storage so how can I insure that what I am testing is only LUNs attached to our dev boxes?  Is that all determined by what virtual machines are added to protection groups in SRM?

"Just make sure that you have create protection group only with LUNs from dev boxes and that any production virtual machine is stored on dev boxes."



I am confused...."production virtual machine is stored on dev boxes."  What do you mean?

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rcporto
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Sometimes due to space constraints, people store production virtual machines on development storage.

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Richardson Porto
Senior Infrastructure Specialist
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/richardsonporto
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JobinG
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SRAs act as an intermediary between Your SRM Server and the array. SRAs are required for the discovering the array/devices and its capabilities.

The Test Failover/Failover/Reverse Replicatio/other SRM operations heavily depends on SRAs.

You may want to refer to compability guide to check the supported SRAs for the 5.8 SRM release.

To answer Your questions.

1.It is ideal to have a separate datastore as placeholder datastore. As placeholder stores only configuration files, the size of the datastore can be very minimal.It needn't be areplicated LUN.

2.Reg. SRA configuration, You  need to install corresponding SRAs for Your array . Configuration involves providing the IP/credentials of the management node of SAN, devices name(s) etc.

Create a protection group with the LUN where Your dev box resides.  Once the protection group is created, You can see the placeholder VM created on the Recovery site.
Ensure there is no warning/errors for the protection group creation process.

3. VMs outside the protection group are not affected.I strongly recommend to do a "Test Failover" before any planned migration/Failover.

Remember we can always do a cleanup if something goes wrong. And this is harmless.

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