Wednesday, November 4, 2009

How to perform manual DR using VMWare and NetAPP?

Well I had been working on vSRM as you can find few reference from my blog about it. But I had been asked to see incase SRM fail how can we have “plan B”.
We used SNAP mirror technologies from NetAPP to accomplish “Plan B”
Here is what I suggested:
1. During initial setup snap mirror on LAN and then once it is completed plan to ship the filer to DR location. This way we can save some bandwidth for replication as it will be only changes which will get replicated.
2. With manual process we need to maintain few documents especially with all the luns which will get replicated across location along with the serial number. The reason will be explained below
3. Once the replication is over we will start preparing for DR testing. For testing purpose I have selected one ESX host with dummy VLAN’s
4. I broke the snap mirror relationship between filer for the volume which was interested in testing. Once the volume is broken it become active and all luns are visible on the filer. It will be with same lun name and lun number . But the serial number will be changes.
5. This being very scariest part of entire exercise . If the lun serial number do not match with that of primary site then lun will appear as blank lun. We need to one to one mapping for lun serial number as it should be matching with that of protected site.

Before you change the lun serial number at the recovery site we need to make the lun offline and then run following command to change the serial number
# lun serial serial number.

Eg: lun serial /vol/S_xxxx_011PP_vol1/lun1 12345

6. Once it has same serial number map the lun to correct igroup and rescan hba on ESX host. Once the rescan is completed all the lun and datastore will appear “AS IT IS ” at the recovery site.

7. We have to register all the VM in order to power on . This can be accomplished using script.

Happy DR.

No comments: