VMware vCenter SRM: Storage Replication - Part 1

[Music] welcome back to the vCenter Site Recovery Manager five video series my name is Andrew Elwood I'm a senior technical instructor with VMware education services this section we're gonna start talking about storage replication one of the key components to having any SRM implementation function is we need to replicate the disks upon which my virtual machines live and that can take a number of different formats and so storage replication part one as you can see on this particular slide we've broken it into two parts to make it a little smaller but there's really two distinct components here we're gonna focus mostly on vSphere replication but we will talk a little bit about the other storage replication technologies behind the scenes so the short version is this we do need to have the disks where the virtual machines store their files replicated to the designated recovery data center and there's two different ways that we can do that and SRM supports both of them we've got the good old tried and proven array based replication this is typically provided by your your storage vendor they will supply replication software specific to the storage array that you have purchased and you get your storage environment configured such that replication occurs storage cabinet to storage cabinet across whatever network connection you have between your two sites vSphere replication which is new with SRM five is bundled with SRM that doesn't have an additional fee associated with it and it replicates individual virtual machines between vSphere clusters and that's a really really powerful little tool because I no longer have to rely on first of all I don't even have to have a big expensive storage area network to do this I can actually replicate if you had a very small environment from local storage to local storage from one host to another not that that's the suggested environment but it is possible with this environment so very powerful tools array-based replication and vSphere replication are considered complementary solutions as you can see at the bottom of the slide and what that's really suggesting is that for some environments adding your virtual machines to the array based replication is leveraging some fairly expensive environment and the idea behind that is that you know the most critical of our systems those that have the shortest replication intervals those that need to be replicated the most frequently should probably be supported by those and then you can backfill some of the less important virtual machines that you would not otherwise have never had either the funding to implement array-based replication or quite frankly you're maybe just taking advantage of a situation where we give you some very cool technology to make it work so you can deploy both of them together and make them work with SRM five so the overview of vSphere replication is very straightforward the biggest thing that you need to be aware of when you setup san-based replication or array based replication you take a given one or a logical unit number or data store and use you target it for replication and what that means is if I've got 20 virtual machines that live on that data store all 20 virtual machines will be replicated well what happens if only eight of those are the ones you want to protect well now you've got a whole bunch of extra bandwidth being consumed because of the replication well the smart administrator will say that's not a problem I'm simply gonna use something like oh I don't know storage vMotion and move those to a different data store well that's great assuming you have a different data store and some environments being the small shop type may not have that flexibility so vSphere replication is wonderful from that perspective it's very simple you simply protect each virtual machine as a property of the virtual machine itself we don't need to have this great big storage infrastructure that's replicating across a wide area network link you simply right-click on the virtual machine and say vSphere replication and answer a few questions and then the ESXi servers that own those virtual machines will take care of the replication between the two sites fantastic set up the summary slide that we're presenting you to hear is very straightforward and it really goes through the list of array-based vs v fear of replication array based replication is is the Cadillac solution there's no doubt about it we can do very short time frames we can guarantee a loss of almost no data to the tune where if you purchase the right type of array based replication you can almost do synchronous replication so when a change occurs it gets replicated whereas vSphere replication we're suggesting the shortest recovery point objective or the shortest the smallest amount of data that we're anticipating losing if there were a true outright failure would be 15 minutes worth of data right now people go well I don't want to lose that well if you don't want to lose that then maybe you should look at array based replication as your solution to support this the with all of the arrays that we support and those are all listed on the SRM hardware compatibility group we also have available what are called SRA s these are the storage replication adapters nothing more than a software component which installs inside the SRM environment that lets us have some visibility into what that array is replicating it also allows us some control over stopping replication in the event that we do a failover and then when we do the automatic Reaper TechEd it can reverse the direction of replication as well so lots of power managed by those SRA s but you do need to have an SRA for each of the storage environments that you're leveraging within your SRM environment so this is a very large architectural diagram and really the items we care about are the items in green all right so we've got the VRMs on the left hand side site one our protected site on this diagram we've got the VRMs which is the vSphere replication management server that's deployed as a virtual appliance as you're gonna see in the present in the demonstration coming up and the VRMs his job is to actually control the vSphere replication servers that are existing within that site well as you can see on this particular diagram there is no VRS on the site one realistically site two is the one that's going to be leveraging the information so the ESXi servers themselves get some of the work offloaded to them the vSphere replication management server owns the process and asks the ESXi server to do the heavy lifting to pass the try across to the target VRS on the recovery site so what do we take from this diagram realistically you need to deploy to vrm asses they're the vSphere replication management servers virtual appliances one per site and then you're going to deploy the vSphere replication servers to actually be the recipient of the traffic when the vSphere the on when the virtual machines are replicated and we'll show you that as we walk through the demonstration so before you can deploy a VC replication management server you need to configure what's called a management address in the vCenter environment that's nothing more than an advanced property on V Center we'll show you that in the demonstration forthcoming and then we're going to go through the procedure to install and configure a vSphere replication management server which is the first portion of this particular deployment keep in mind that you do need to view part two in order to end up with a fully functional vSphere replication environment so here we are logged back into the vSphere client we're focusing on site three and if we click the link on the bottom left for vSphere replication you'll see that there's a laundry list of items we need to do to get it to go so the first step is to deploy our vSphere management or the vrm server so click on the link the trick is is that if we were to do that right now it would fail halfway through so one of the first things we need to set is in fact the managed IP address for the vCenter server so we did that by going to administration vCenter server settings and then simply type in the IP address of the vCenter server into the managed IP field now that we have that completed we can now click on the deploy vrm server link and at that point we can just step our way through the dialog part of the installation when we selected to have the vSphere components installed as a part of the base installation of SRM gave us the ability to have these OVF files available to us so now we're proceeding through the interface we're giving it a name I traditionally named it the fully qualified domain name of the actual VRMs server the vSphere replication management server now we pre-populated our DNA with the appropriate IP settings for this server we chose them and set them aside for this deployment so you'll see later on how we configure the IP address at this point we're simply selecting wearing inventory we want it to show up which data store we want it to live on what network it's going to be connected to and here comes that some of the configuration this is where we set the administrative password for the replication management server specified the default gateway for this particular deployment again this is all information that you should have available to you before you start this because you are configuring the virtual appliance at this point in time any mistakes made here are correctable after the fact but it's infinitely easier to get it right the first time so take a few moments to review the screens as you type them in here with the information that you gathered prior to doing the deployment so one more dialogue to fill in here and that will be the net mask and once we've completed that we'll continue onwards by selecting next and the appliance will then prompt us for some minor little additional things a summary screen which says this is what we're going to do and then the installation goes ahead and deploys and it's going to go ahead and deploy based on the information that we filled in in the wizard during the deployment as well as the packaging information in the OVF file and here we see that it's completed successfully so our vSphere replication management server has been deployed on site 3 we would also need to do the same on site four go through exactly the same procedure so that you have your VRMs in both sites so one per site deployed as appropriate so here we're looking to see the VRMs server itself as it shows up in inventory we find it under the vSphere replication dialog because that's what we chose when deploying it and at this point I'm just simply opening up the console so that we get to see that this is running one of the tricks with this is that you'll find on the hyperlinks within the deployment area of the replication management server the configuration link takes a while to come up if you're just sitting looking at it you have to wait until the replication management server has not only deployed but rebooted the first time there we clearly saw that the VRMs was up and running we'll then go back to our SRM configuration dialog box and we'll wait a couple of moments and then the hyperlink will show up under step two where we'll look at configuring the vrm server so here we see the hyperlink simply select that under step two it takes us to a web page and at this point you're going to want to click continue to proceed to this website you're going to type the username for the VRMs server is in fact root with the appropriate password and that's the password you set during the deployment now we'll see the getting started page move onwards to the configuration page which is the next step and this page is incredibly important if you make a typo here it is somewhat challenging to repair it so things we need to cover are where is the database for the vSphere replication management server and we pre-populated that we got that set up already it's a sequel server that's running on the same physical server as the SRM and vCenter in our particular instance we're going to type in the username that we associated with the database the database name we use the default of VRMs underscore DB the appropriate password the host itself is the IP address where the vrm is in fact running and the vCenter server address this field above all is the most critical do not leave it at the pre-populated IP address make sure you type the fully qualified domain name of the vCenter server and it will work reliably make sure you don't make any typos either I don't the rest of the information is as appropriate user name password admin email then we're going to generate and install a an SSL certificate and I select ok self certificate self signed certificate was installed successfully at the top of the dialog we're then gonna save and restart the service at this point we can simply log out the user root and close the browser interface and at that point we have successfully deployed and configured the vrm server the next step in the process will be to proceed onwards and do exactly the same thing for site 4 or the other site in your SRM environment and once you've got both of those done we're then going to configure the VRMs connection which is step 3 in this link notice that the hyperlink is now alive so that will be one of our next pieces so that completes the deployment of the VRMs server remember that vSphere replication is not complete until we've actually deployed the vrs server which will be a part of the next presentation so make sure that you look at that if you're interested in learning more about SRM in detail you can go to our website at www.opm.gov/tribalprograms [Music]

Channel: VMware

Views: 97,524

Keywords: VMware, SRM, vCenter, vCenter Site Recovery Manager, Site Recovery Manager, Disaster Protection, Getting Started with SRM, Storage Replication

Id: bB_qs0ZZci0

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 02 2012