Data Protection – Actifio

I’ve been working with VMware, Storage and Data Protection for sometime now and over the years I’ve seen data protection products come and go. A lot of the products/applications/appliances showed innovative, cutting edge technology but often focused on one particular area or system type which left the product lacking and often missed the mark when it came [...]

EMC SRA for VNX with VDM Replication error fix

Just a quick post on a problem I had this week at a customer site running VMware Site Recovery Manager 5 with EMC Celerra and VNX mix. I actually had everything up and running for a couple of weeks before I logged in again to notice in the “Array Manager” section, both arrays showed status [...]

VMware SRM with CLARIION SRA Gotcha

I was working on a VMware SRM with EMC CLARIION implementation when I come across another gotcha and thought id post about it. I had to change the IP Address’s for the CLARIION management ports at the DR site and with doing so I went into SRM and edited the array manager configuration so the DR array information used the new management [...]

VMware Site Recovery Manager with CLARIION Gotcha

Im working on a nice little project at the moment which involves a couple of CX120′s with vSphere  4.1 and VMware Site Recovery Manager 4.1 After installing Site Recovery Manager,  the CLARIION storage replication adapter and EMC solutions enabler I went on to configure the storage arrays in SRM and received the following error ” Error occurred [...]

iSCSI or NFS with EMC Celerra ?

There has always been a lot of debate in the VMware community about which IP storage protocol performs best and to be honest I’ve never had the time to do any real comparisons on the EMC Celerra, but recently I stumbled across a great post by Jason Boche comparing the performance of NFS and iSCSI storage using the Celerra NS120, you can [...]

Site Recovery Manager… is the test button really a test ?

One of the best features of Site Recovery Manager is the ability to perform regular testing of the DR process without any impact on the production systems. Just recently a mate in the UK called me up with an issue which occurred while he was performing a failover in SRM, I had seen the exact same issue before on a customers site so after [...]

Celerra VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Failback Plug-in v 4.0

Given the amount of people talking in the forums about how Site Recovery Manager 1.x did not support automated failback, I was a little surprised to find this functionality also missing from 4.0. Well the good news is if you have an EMC Celerra, the new failback plug-in now supports SRM 4.0 and allows a user to [...]

Licensing Considerations for vCenter Linked Mode

Vmware vCenter Linked Mode enables a common inventory view across multiple instances of vCenter Server. Over the last year Ive deployed a number of VI3 systems with Site Recovery Manager in the mix and one of the things that always annoyed me was having to manage each site separately. Now with vCenter Linked Mode both sites can be [...]

SRM 4 Finally Released

Yes, much to my surprise today SRM 4 is now available from the VMware download site.   I was at a customers site this morning when an email from VMware come through on my BlackBerry announcing SRM 4 had been released, After racing home at the end of the day I logged in and started [...]

Celerra Lun fails to snapshot during SRM Test

Today I was thinking about a problem I had this week with site recovery manager and thought id post something just to keep track of the errors and in case someone had the same problem. Let me paint a picture. Protected Site Virtual Center Server with SRM installed Celerra storage replication adapter Three  node VMware HA/DRS cluster. Celerra NS120 presenting [...]