Integrating EMC RecoverPoint Appliance (RPA) with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). However, before we dive in, if you are not familiar with RPA technology, let me explain first with a high overview:
RPAs are a block LUN IP based replication appliance. RPAs are zoned via FC with all available storage ports. RPAs leverage a “Replication Journal” to track changes within a LUN, once the LUNs have fully seeded between the two sites, the journal log will only send changed deltas over the WAN. This allows you to keep your existing WAN link and not spend more money on WAN expansion. The RPA’s use of the journal log allows it to efficiently track changes to the LUNS and replicate the differences over the WAN. Because RPA can track the changes to the LUNs it can create a Bookmark every 5-10 sec depending on the rate of change and bandwidth. This will keep your data up to date and within a 10 second recover point objective. RPA can also allow you to restore or test your replicated data from any one of the bookmarks created.
Leveraging RPA with VMware LUNs greatly increases the availability of your data upon any maintenance or disaster. Because RPA Blue Prism Training replicate block LUNs, RPAs will replicate LUNs that have datastores formatted on them.
At high overview, to failover a datastore you would:
- Initiate a failover on the RPA.
- Add the LUNs into an existing storage group in the target site.
- Rescan your HBAs in Vsphere O.
- Once the LUNs are visible you will notice a new data store available.
- Open the datastore and add all the VMs into inventory.
- Once all the VMs added configure your networking and power up your machine.
Although this procedure may seem straight forward, your RTO (Recovery Time Objective) will increase.
With VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) integration, plug-in the failover procedure can be automated. With SRM you have the ability to build policies as to which v-switch you want each VM to move to as well as which VM you want to power up first. Once the policies are built and tested (yes you can test failover), to failover your virtual site you simply hit the failover button and watch the magic happen.
SRM will automate the entire failover process and bring your site online in a matter of a few seconds or minutes depending on the size of your virtual site. If you are considering replicating your virtual environment, I’d advise considering how long you can sustain to be down and how much data you can sustain to lose. The use of Recover Point Appliance and Site Recovery Manager can assure that you can achieve your disaster recovery goals.