Glad to see that people are having downloading and success with the Celerra VM on VMware Workstation based on this original post. I wanted to provide a quick "HOWTO" to help customers Replicate between two VSAs, for many reasons - one of the most fun being VMware Site Recovery Manager.
Celerra Replicator (I hope the Celerra Product team doesn't read this) is a RIDICULOUSLY inexpensive (particularly when compared with the competition) but very sophisticated remote replication capability. It can support cool stuff like:
- 1:N and also N:1 replication fan-in/fan-out replication relationships (like with any technology there are operating envelopes and parameters)
- It can support cascading topologies (i.e. site one replicates to site 2 with a given frequency, and then site 2 replicates the data from site 1 to site 3 at a different frequency
- It has pretty sophisticated QoS mechanisms (i.e. you can setup different bandwidth use for different parts of the day
- You can replicate all sorts of configs - CIFS/NFS/iSCSI, and fully supports thin provisioning at the source or the target
- And of course - most interestingly of all - it's fully integrated with VMware Site Recovery Manager (so you can use this to build your own SRM playground.
Of course - SRM doesn't support NFS yet, so I focused this HOWTO on iSCSI - but it's very easy to see how you would do CIFS/NFS (just hit the other radio button in step 3)
Before you do this - make sure you have a working VSA - just follow the Celerra VSA HOWTO 101 here...
I've updated the OVF - tightened it up a bit. You can get the new one here
Ok - have you got it? Have you followed the 101? Want to add more storage - just follow the Celerra VSA HOWTO 201 here.
Ok... then read on...
Quickly then here - in this HOWTO:
- Configuring NTP
- Correcting the Replication Database (post Clone or deploy from OVF the Celerra VM's serial number is changed) - BIG thanks to Himabindu Tummala and Santosh PasulaReddy in Celerra Engineering for helping me figure this step out
- Configuring an iSCSI LUN that will be used as a replication target
- Configuring Celerra Replicator
One of our elite-delta squad VMware Specialists is putting the finishing touches on an "all in" doc and pair of Celerra VSAs to make setting up SRM with two Celerra VSAs a breeze, but you have every ingredient you need now with these HOWTOs (and SRM itself is a walk in the park).
One quick note - remember that if you are looking for support - post on http://forums.emc.com, in the Celerra, Celerra Simulator forum.
Next up to plate is the HOWTO on Avamar Virtual Edition, and I'm also going to do a HOWTO post on how to use the super-cool Replication Manager with the VSA. Rep Manager - aka "RM" can actually be used with all EMC's primary storage platforms, for all sorts of replication/test and dev use cases - for Exchange, SQL Server, Oracle, and also VMware VMs and VMFS datastores - NFS datastores being supported shortly.
Read on......
Continue reading "Celerra Virtual Appliance HOWTO 301 - Replicating Between Two Celerra VSAs" »

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