Howdy all,
Pre-information: This is an environment I've just inherited warts and all so bear with me. I've got a CX300 and a CX500 hooked together and a San Copy session setup to comfortably pull a copy of a Lun from the Cx3 to the Cx5 which has never been tested. The client was sold San Copy as the solution to their replication needs, but I suspect this was without the additional information required to make it entirely useful.
Firstly, am I correct in remembering that I cannot San Copy a mounted (ie powered-on vm guests stored in it) Lun without risking dropping the attached hosts and therefore crashing the live vm guests? I realise I would end up with a crash consistant copy anyway if I did this, but I'm hoping they can hot-copy safely and fix afterwards.
Is there a workaround for the above by perhaps using SnapView on the Lun, San Copying that (if you can?) and the recovering the crash consistant vmdks?
As they have directly formatted their Luns as VMFS with no RDM used, am I also correct in stating that the all VM's in the LUN must be powered off to get a non-crash consistant copy of the LUN such as might be used for DR purposes? I recall with RDM mapped drives you can quiesce the guests and snap the LUN safely.
Lastly, if anyone is using a similar configuration, or has a recommendation for the best DR-oriented replication I can achieve in this scenario without spending extra budget I would appreciate hearing it. I believe there are also FC to IP converters in a box around here somewhere with plans to move one of the Sans to a sister site and tie in a fast transit between them so that is also under consideration. I have no problem with rebuilding the Luns to RDM as there aren't that many guests on there, but I'm uncertain if this would be the best way forward.
Thanks in advance.
