VM's not appearing in SRM Protection group

[hattn]

Hi.

We have SRM configured between two sites. LUNS are replicated with two equallogic disc arrays. Everything is working fine.

However: we wanted to att a production system that has wmdk disc spread across different LUNS. OS resides on on LUN, and production databases reside on a different LUN.  We created a volume collection in Equallogic to replicate the two LUNS and replication started. BUT: although they are replicated, I'm not able to add them to a new protection group in SRM plug-in.

I have tested to add a single vmdk virtual machine to one of the luns within the volume collection. That works. So the problem seem to be when operating system and other discs reside on different LUNS. Or have I missed something?

Best regards,

Philip

[kastlr]

Hi Philip,

did you perform a rescan arrays operation after you created the "volume collection"?

Whenever you change something on the array replication layer you need to allow the SRAs need to rediscover the arrays.

I'm not familiar with Equallogic disk arrays, but SRM does support VM's which resides on multiple VMFS Datastores or mutlitple p/vRDMs.

Kind regards,

Ralf

[hattn]

Hi Ralf.

I did a rescann after modifying the volumes. SRM found the LUN where the dummy vm is. The LUN where the database files are was not showing up at all. Neither the servers that had vmdks on both luns. Strange...

Do you mean I cant have servers that have vmdks in different datastores? This is my setup now:

LUN1 (operating system)

LUN2 (datbase files)

Server1 (server not appearing i protection group)

  OS - LUN1

  DB - LUN2

  Db - LUN2

Server2 (server not appearing i protection group)

  OS - LUN1

  Db - LUN2

  Db - LUN2

Server 3 - Dummy (server appearing in protection grouop)

  OS- LUN1

So... Server 1 and 2 are not showing up. Possible cause would be the config with vmdks residing on both LUN1 and LUN2. Server3 shows up nicely, but it just has its os disc on LUN1

[kastlr]

Hi Philip,

using multiple replicated LUN's for a VM is fully supported by SRM, so in general your environment is supported.

As I said I'm not familiar with Equallogic, but I bet you need to create some kind of consistancy group on the array side.

This makes sure that both LUNs will be handled as a consistent pair.

Hth,

Ralf

[hattn]

Hi Ralf and thanks for your answer.

The Volume Collection in Equallogic should be the way to do it. It pairs both LUNS so that stay up to date with each other. But I have missed something. Just opened a case with Dell. Perhaps they will come up with the answer.

/Philip

[hattn]

OK. Thanks for your help. The solution is now found. It was simple:

- when we created the new replicated lun for the OS, we did a storage vmotion of the os disc to the new lun

- what was forgotten was to also migrate the configuration to the new lun

Problem was that os vmdk and config not being on the same lun/datastore. When config was migrated to replicated lun SRM showed me the Vm's,

/Philip