Wednesday morning present – SRM 4 and Mirroview Insight for VMware

This is a FANTASTIC free tool that is included in the latest MirrorView SRA.

So – what does it do?

Well – you can run it before you setup a VMware Site Recovery Manager recovery plan, and it makes it much easier.   It will summarize whether the underlying replication pre-requisites have been met for individual VMs (some customer have VMs with VMDKs on multiple datastores, or VMs that have multiple RDMs), or entire datastores (some customers have spanned extents).   This is an incredibly powerful capability, and makes SRM+Replication setup much easier.

And… you can run it after you execute a Site Recovery Manager recovery plan, and use it to failback, including every step except sequencing and IP address changes.

Where do you get it?  It automatically installs when you download the MirrorView SRA from VMware here.

Here’s a great short demo of this awesome tool in action – check it out!

You can download a high-rez version of this demo here in WAV and MOV format.

Thanks to a couple people:

First of all – the incredible Giri Basava.   Part of CLARiiON engineering, he single-handedly developed the MirrorView Insight for VMware tool.   Giri is always awesome and coming up with great innovate ideas.   Above and beyond that one thing I admire about him in particular is amazing customer focus.   Whenever we’ve had a Mirrorview SRM case, bam – get it to Giri and it’s resolved.   Giri – you are incredible!

Second – in “Chad’s army” – Alex Tanner and Ben Dunning.   Alex – for his great work on this tool in beta – a lot of the things people will like are a result of Alex working hand in hand with Giri.  Alex has great “customers will dig this” instincts.   Ben - thanks for working on this demonstration video!

So, to recap for customers using EMC replication products and VMware:

• If you’re sitting on the fence about SRM – stop :-)   Join the more than 2000 SRM customers around the world – the majority of which are using EMC Storage Replication Adapters.  With SRM 4 adding vSphere 4 support, N:1 replication topologies, NFS datastores support, and faster recovery plan execution – there’s no reason to wait, particularly if you are virtualizing mission critical applications that need disaster recovery.   At EMC we’re happy to help you – regardless of your protocol, regardless of your scale, regardless of your recovery point objectives.  We can cover it all – heck, we can cover heterogenous (non EMC storage) use cases too!
• If you’re an EMC/VMware partner – make sure you check out the standard service kits available on Powerlink.  These can help you work with your customers to accelerate their VMware Site Recovery Manager deployments. 
• SRM 4 coverage: Celerra (both block and NAS), CLARiiON Mirrorview, and Recoverpoint SRAs have fully completed their VMware qual and are available.   In fact, I was happy to see that our engineering and qual work paid off – and Celerra and Mirrorview were there day one of the SRM 4 launch.
• The only EMC adapter who’s qual has not yet finished is SRDF, and it’s SRM 4 SRA is just about done.   Should be any day now.
• Each of the latest EMC remote replication adapters and replication products does something above and beyond the SRM basics at no extra cost.
  • EMC Celerra Replicator: has a vCenter plugin that automates failback for iSCSI (associating VM objects and making it simple to reverse replication, present back to the production site, renaming datastores, handling VMware un/registration, automating VM power-on activities)
  • EMC Mirrorview: has Mirrorview Insight for iSCSI, FC, and FCoE use cases.   This actually does even more than the Celerra failback tool – including changing VM networks.
  • EMC Recoverpoint itself directly integrates with vCenter, making mapping of dependencies and configuration a piece of cake, for iSCSI, FC, and FCoE use cases.

So.. What’s next on the topic of VMware-related DR?

• We couldn’t leave the Symm out with all this additional bonus stuff :-) The next SRDF SRA has tools to make configuration, setup, test, and failback much easier – this has been the #1 requested feature for SRDF use cases.
• The next version of the Celerra vCenter plugins expands the failback capability a fair amount.  While the Celerra SRA supports iSCSI and NFS, right now the failback capability is iSCSI only.  NFS failback support is around the corner.   Some additional failover handling (VMware network reconfig, start sequence) are all also being worked on.
• I’m corralling the product teams to make sure that the good ideas that they came up with independently get integrated across the product portfolios (I know this is what customers would like us to do).
• We’re heads down with VMware on the next major rev of SRM, which does a LOT.   Ultimately this will be the right long term vehicle for completely exhausive failback (and other powerful workflows!) management – and a lot of the lessons learnt from all this innovating extra tools we’ve developed are being applied.   Still early days down that project, but SRM will continue to expand it’s functionality!!

Comments

[Alan]

Chad,

I've been looking for documentation for this but I understand it's not finished yet. Well I found this blog which does a really good job of explaining it.

http://www.vmworld.com/people/bladeraptor/blog/2009/09/02/mirrorview-insight-for-vmware-the-next-generation-site-recovery-adpater-for-vmware-srm-that-includes-failback

Alan