VMs with RDMs

[gtlscot]

Hi

Hopefully not being stupid.  Scenario several VMs with large RDM disks attached.  The VM OS disks are in RecoverPoint protected LUNs.  So are the RDM disks.  However, SRM does not see these RecoverPoint LUNs.  How can I use SRM in this scenario?

Thanks

SRM 4.0 soon to be 4.1.1

Graeme

[admin]

Not to sure if this is what your exact problem is but here are some VMware KB articles which may be worth a read??

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1032556

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1020698

[TimOudin · Accepted solution]

I've built exactly the same environment without issues, only key is having the RDM LUN in the same RecoverPoint Consistency Group.  The RDM pointer files will also need to be on a LUN in the same CG, hopefully stored with your VM config files.  I can't really tell from your comment if you are in the same CG or not.  Cheers

[AndyTipton]

The RDMs don't need to be in the same CG's as the VMDK's, they just need to be in the same SRM Protection Groups.

Andy

[gtlscot]

Andy

That is interesting. I say that as when we create protection groups we do not see RDMs only datastores.  Is there something wrong with our config?

Thanks

Graeme

[AndyTipton]

Hi Graeme, I just re-read you post and saw you were on SRM v4 back in Oct. Apologies, I was coming purely from a v5 standpoint.

Are you still on v4 now or have you moved to v5?

I can tell you in v5 that as long as you enable SRM in RP on your datastore and RDM CG's accordingly, when you go to create the protection group in SRM it will automatically group the RDM's with the datatsore they belong to. SRM knows that those RDMs belong to servers on that datastore and when you run the recovery it links them together at the target site and starts them up. No manual intervention. At least that's how it worked for me an I was suitably impressed.

The rule I follow with adding disks to VMs is to always store the disk information on the same store that the VMDKs are on. If you had RDMs storing their info on disparate datastores I don't know how it would work but I'm guessing it would get a bit confused.

Andy

[MMRNOLA]

Hate to dig up an old topic but I had a question:

We use NFS datastores for our guest (NetApp). We have several SQL servers with RDMs. From what i'm reading, you can't store the RDM mapping files on a NFS datastore. When our vendor installed SnapManager for SQL he had us provision a VMFS datastore so he could store the mapping files on them.

SRM 5 recognises this VMFS datastore within the arrary manager but gives us an error when we create a protection group saying the disks are not recongized.

After reading through this thread, you guys recommend storing these files local to the same datastore the guest is on which is not possible in my case.

Other than creating some complex scripts via SnapDrive CLI commands and SQL, does anyone have any other ideas? This scripting proces is becoming more and more complex as we get further.