A neat, short demonstration we did for a customer showing how they could leverage EMC Replication Manager for VMware-integrated snapshots of their NFS datastores for an Oracle use case.
In this scenario, EMC Replication Manager is doing a VMware-integrated NFS datastore (on an EMC Celerra) snapshot for a simplified, non-disruptive test/dev use case of an Oracle VM – while it’s doing about 6300 transactions/min generated by swingbench. Like all EMC platforms, the Celerra can create simple, fast, writeable snapshots. Like all EMC platforms (both block and NAS), it can be managed by EMC Replication Manager with VMware integration (correlation of objects with vCenter, and leveraging transient ESX snapshots as an intermediary step).
Download a high-rez version of the demo here.
BTW – you can use these technologies to make “repro in a physical” fast an easy. The two primary ways are: 1) on block devices using physical mode RDMs, which can be quickly snapshotted and presented to a physical host; 2) on NAS devices, using dNFS into the guest allows you to simply mount on a physical host. Simple, easy “get out of jail free” card for those virtualizing Oracle. More on this later.
What’s coming next in this vein:
- very soon, the ability to do VM-level snapshot operations (in addition to datastore-level one shown here) on NFS datastores. Today, datastore level snapshots are still useful for VM-level operations, but involves mounting the entire snapshotted datastore. Restoring the VM to the original production datastore involves a “copy back” step which takes some time. Still that’s much, much faster than a traditional restore. I never think of array snapshots as a “complete backup solution”, but they are awesome for “why not restore that way if you have it available”.
- longer-term via the vStorage APIs for Array Integration or VAAI (which was demonstrated at VMworld 2009), similar hardware-offloaded VM-level replica capability on block devices.
Thanks Stephen Spellicy for the demo – you rock!
BTW – clever watchers of my team’s demonstrations (including this one) are finding hidden clues of other as of yet non-public Virtual Appliances we already have at our disposal as they are there in our vCenter inventories. Someone found the Rainifinity GFV (still not public) in the one I recently posted (see the comment here). See if you can find the unreleased EMC VM appliance in this demo :-)
Also – I’m not trying to be a tease :-) If we haven’t made it public, it’s usually because there are still too many caveats (like need for specific devices, or VMDirectpath configurations that are narrow)…, but… working on it :-)
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