Anyone planning on using Site Recovery Manager with NetApp?

[jamieorth]

The company I just started for has on order 2 FAS3040's and SRM. The NetApps will be hooked together through MetroEthernet. They are planning on having SiteA be able to failover to SiteB with the ability to also run VM's at either location at any time. That's the part that seems impossible to me. Now your talking about reversing the direction of the replication of SnapMirror. Just looking to get some feedback.

Regards...

Jamie

Remember, if it's not one thing, it's your mother...

[dkfbp]

We are planning on using SRM with our two netapp fas3020. Our secondary datacenter is to far away to run synchronus so we are replicating every 15 minutes. Since SRM has not been released yet we are holding back on this. But it is a thing we will implement when the product is finally released.

Best regards

Frank Brix Pedersen

[jamieorth]

What type/speed connection do you have between sites and how much data are you replicating? I hear that SRM should be released very soon....I was suprised to see that this company was able to purchase something not released yet. Also, how do you like the NetApps? This will be my first time using them. I came from an EMC shop. Are you using FC, iScsi, or FC?

Regards...

Jamie

Remember, if it's not one thing, it's your mother...

[dkfbp]

Hi,

We have 1 Gig between our datacenters. At the moment we have 9TB of data we are replicating.

Best regards

Frank Brix Pedersen

[daniel_uk · Accepted solution]

Most of what they "presume" can be done will be probably unsupported and unachievable in the first release. I seriously recommend meeting with a Vmware rep to get some demo time.

The way I see SRM is that as long as the commands and SAN interface is supported it does the same activity as all other arrays, the more decisive factor is in how your storage replication works and how frequent etc.

[dalepa]

We are looking into it... My main question is how SRM integrates with AD/DNS...

Also I keep hearing that NFS won't be initially supported. Is this true? If so, why?

I see lots of issues with SRM....

[jamieorth]

My understanding is that SRM integrates through VC, so SRM doesn't communicate to AD/DNS, VC does... I don't know about the NFS, but it is up to the storage vendor to provide the hooks for the replication, so someone like NetApp would have to provide that functionality and if NFS was used, I don't see where SRM would care.

Regards...

Jamie

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Remember, if it's not one thing, it's your mother...

[dalepa]

I agree, SRM shouldn't care about protocol, it should be the vendors responsibility... Can someone confirm if Netapp will support all protocols from day one?

Will SRM require that you have an AD/DNS virtual environment? Since you will need an isolated network for SRM testing (you don't want these tests to effect production), I'm guessing that you will also want to have an isolated AD/DNS environment along with your other VMs. Will it be recommended/best practice to have virtual DNS and AD servers for SRM?

dp

[Rick_Schlander]

I am considering it, but want to implement NFS instead of FC or iSCSI. I have two environments now - one is FC and the other is iSCSI and want the flexibility that NFS provides, but I am concerned about SRM support for NFS. I have a NetApp whitepaper that has a chart in it saying that it will be supported, but has an asterisk next to it indicating that it is available when support for vSphere is announced.

[azn2kew]

I was looking at this for the client and trying to get SRM 1.5 beta to see if it really supported for NFS but seems like the information is very limited since its under NDA. I believe it will be supported but can't confirm by now still researching and if you have any new details please share.

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Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

VMware vExpert 2009

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant