Why Site Recovery Manager Update 1 is so welcome..
Like a breath of fresh air, like a long lost friend from college, like the smell of toll house cookies on a lazy summer afternoon, that is how I feel about SRM update 1. Although the list of new features could have been longer in this release I am hoping that Update 1 was merely a stopgap (to appease the masses) for the more feature rich release of Update X or SRM X.0, whatever route VMware chooses to take this. Anyhow here are the new features in this release…
- New Permission Required to Run a Recovery Plan
SRM now distinguishes between permission to test a recovery plan and permission to run a recovery plan. After an SRM server is updated to this release, existing users of that server who had permission to run a recovery plan no longer have that permission. You must grant Run permission to these users after the update is complete. Until you do, no user can run a recovery plan. (Permission to test a recovery plan is unaffected by the update.) - Full Support for RDM devices
SRM now provides full support for virtual machines that use raw disk mapping (RDM) devices. This enables support of several new configurations, including Microsoft Cluster Server. (Virtual machine templates cannot use RDM devices.)..
This is a big deal and was discouraging to alot of our customers, I am glad to see this was pushed to the forefront.
- Batch IP Property Customization
This release of SRM includes a tool that allows you to specify IP properties (network settings) for any or all of the virtual machines in a recovery plan by editing a comma-separated-value (csv) file that the tool generates.
Heaven help you if you every had to change the IP properties for all you VM’s at the recovery site, again another great time saver…
- Limits Checking and Enforcement
A single SRM server can support up to 500 protected virtual machines and 150 protection groups. This release of SRM prevents you from exceeding those limits when you create a new protection group. If a configuration created in an earlier release of SRM exceeds these limits, SRM displays a warning, but allows the configuration to operate. - Improved Support for Virtual Machines that Span Multiple Datastores.
This release provides improved support for virtual machines whose disks reside on multiple datastores.
I am seeing this more and more at client sites, its very disconcerting that customers are doing this as the ramifications of said practices only hurts you in the long run. But none the less the need has been feed..
- Single Action to Reconfigure Protection for Multiple Virtual Machines
This release introduces a Configure All button that applies existing inventory mappings to all virtual machines that have a status of Not Configured.
Sweet baby Jesus, this is a great time saver as well, what shall I do with all my spare time that I am getting back? You tell me..
- Simplified Log Collection
This release introduces new utilities that retrieve log and configuration files from the server and collect them in a compressed (zipped) folder on your desktop. - Improved Acceptance of Non-ASCII Characters
non-ASCII characters are now allowed in many fields during installation and operation.
Choosing a RecoverPoint Splitter
Choosing a RecoverPoint splitter is based upon many environmental scenarios and hence is ultimately what forces you into your decision. For instance, lets look at the following scenarios and what dictates your choice:
The yellow column defines some of the well known feature sets that are supported with the three types of splitters in the blue columns. So according to this chart if replication of physical RDM’s is desired then all three splitters would accommodate. However if you are looking to replicate VMFS datastores then only the CLARiiON and Fabric splitters would do. So with this chart above you could quickly determine what splitter is needed based upon your companies environmental situation and needs.
The King coming to Durham
For those of you that have the opportunity and happen to be in the area, I would suggest going to see B.B. King in Durham on Sunday night. He truly is one of the most influential musicians and storytellers of his time. For those that have never gone to a show it encompasses a mix of great blues, deep southern rooted, uplifting epilogue and general crowd interaction and participation with a legend. My goal for the show? and yes I am going…is to get him to mark his signature on my strat. Maybe he will look beyond that fact that its a fender, I wouldn’t want to make Lucille jealous : )
Recoverpoint: Fabric Manager Rue <Please may I have another>
Like every thing else out there, knowing where to turn when you need answers is critical to your success as an IT professional. Some rely on technical dribble from the vendors themselves, useful in many respects, but sometimes you have to let the air out of the tires to get to the core content. And still others rely on the backs of other peer professionals that have trenched it out, have placed the proverbial toothpicks between their eyelids, burned the midnight oil, to uncover tidbits of knowledge that results in a moment of Eureka!!! Well consider this a lob my friends….
Enter Cisco Bug ID CSCsr49954 and CSCsu02826, if these were a man I would punch them as they caused me hours of delay over the past few days. So what happened? Well on the Gen 3 RPA’s <remember I talked a little bit about them here> the Qlogic 2462’s have the ability to function as both initiators and targets, dual mode capabilities if you will. So here is where using Fabric Manager bites you, here are the Symptoms below (Primus emc198785)…In short, don’t believe your eyes…
Yeah I know it goes against all that your mother told you was true (sorry didn’t mean to bring mothers into this)…but facts are facts, and the fact is you should be zoning your RPA’s from the command line it greatly simplifies this intermediary step that is a one time core requirement. So here are your options other than CLI:
- Upgrade to Fabric Manager 4.1 (1b) or higher <first hand, this is not 100%, it fixes the RPA switch entries but FLOGI for your devices still show as NPV and in some instances iSCSI for the port info, what?? Toss it, get over you laziness (myself included) and spend the extra 10 mins from the CLI.
- Upgrade to Recoverpoint 3.1- Wait a minute, if you using SRM (Site Recovery Manager), this isn’t a supported option. Check your HCL’s!!!
And here are the symptoms for your pleasure…
Symptom: Under the switch tab in FM, see entries that show ‘No IP Address’ under the status column and ‘Kashya’ under the vendor column.The Topology map shows red line through the RPA device. This by far, should be your biggest tip off to this issue.
Symptom:
Under output of show fcns database details, see the fc4-types:fc4_features showing all the features including npv and in some cases virtual:
VSAN:1 FCID:0×3b0017
————————
port-wwn (vendor) :50:01:24:82:00:13:9e:61
[RP1_N2_I2_VSAN1]
node-wwn :50:01:24:82:00:13:9e:60
class :3
node-ip-addr :0.0.0.0
ipa :ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
fc4-types:fc4_features :scsi-fcp:both hippi-fp 66 70 73 74 78 bbl-ctrl 86 fc-vi 89 94 fc-av 99 102 131 132 133 134 135 136 138 141 145 146 147 149 151 152 153 154 155 163 164 165 166 167 168 170 173 177 178 179 181 183 184 185 186 187 195 196 197 198 199 200 202 205 209 210 211 213 215 216 217 218 219 227 sdv npv 230 232 233 234 236 237 239 240 241 242 244 252
symbolic-port-name :
symbolic-node-name :
port-type :N
port-ip-addr :0.0.0.0
fabric-port-wwn :20:02:00:0d:ec:69:e1:80
hard-addr :0×000000
permanent-port-wwn (vendor) :50:01:24:82:00:13:9e:61
Symptom: fc4-types:fc4_features :scsi-fcp:both hippi-fp 66 70 73 74 78 bbl-ctrl 86 fc-vi 89 94 fc-av 99 102 131 132 133 134 135 136 138 141 145 146 147 149 151 152 153 154 155 163 164 165 166 167 168 170 173 177 178 179 181 183 184 185 186 187 192 197 198 201 202 203 204 207 208 209 212 213 216 virtual
Thanks for listening, Its been a long week..cant wait to drown myself in turkey : )
Sunshine with INQ…
You know, this may be common knowledge, there may be a thousand other utilities that serve this function but I thought I would further propagate this utilities cause especially in the virtual world. INQ is the tool I speak of and it brings a whole lot of goodness. Ok its not that great, but it does allow you from a host perspective to map the LUN id of a specific volume. Useable? I think so.
Here is what you need, the binaries…located here, ftp://ftp.emc.com/pub/symm3000/inquiry/latest. Run the utility from the command line on any OS of which there is a tool. Below is what you will see…
If multiple arrays are attached to the host then verify the correct vendor. Here particularly we are focused on the DGC VEND which as you know is an EMC CLARiiON array. What we want to focus on is the first 2 digits which represent the LUN ID in Hex. Simply convert that number to decimal and you have your LUN ID.
Now here’s the downside, I haven’t figured out how to recognize LUN ID’s beyond 255 (FF) as the last two LUNs represent LUN ID 257 and 258. See what I mean, not so recognizable anymore from this utility but I assume I am missing something as most Symm LUN ID’s run well past 255. Maybe this is just a limitation of other array’s outside of Symm’s, anybody know?
