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Design and Implementation Guide

EMC VSPEX

Abstract

This document describes the EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructure solution for private cloud deployments with EMC RecoverPoint, VMware vSphere, and EMC® VNX® for up to 1000 virtual machines. October, 2013

EMC® VSPEX™ with EMC® RecoverPoint™ for VMware vSphere® 5.5

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2 EMC VSPEX with EMC RecoverPoint for VMware vSphere 5.5 2

Copyright © 2013 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA.

Published October, 2013

EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice.

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For the most up-to-date regulatory document for your product line, go to the technical documentation and advisories section on the EMC online support website.

EMC VSPEX with EMC RecoverPoint for VMware vSphere 5.5 Design and Implementation Guide

Part Number H12298

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EMC VSPEX with EMC RecoverPoint for VMware vSphere 5.5 3

Contents

1.0 Executive Summary ............................................................................................ 9

2.0 Background and RecoverPoint Overview ........................................................... 10

2.1 Document purpose .................................................................................................... 10

2.2 Target Audience ......................................................................................................... 10

2.3 Business Challenges .................................................................................................. 10

3.0 RecoverPoint Solution ...................................................................................... 11

3.1 RecoverPoint Continuous Local Data Protection ......................................................... 11

3.2 RecoverPoint Remote Replication ............................................................................... 12

3.3 RecoverPoint Local+Remote Replication ..................................................................... 13

4.0 Solutions Overview .......................................................................................... 14

4.1 Operational Recovery and Disaster Recovery .............................................................. 15

4.2 Application Aware Bookmarking ................................................................................ 16

4.3 VMware vCenter Server .............................................................................................. 17

4.4 EMC Virtual Storage Integrator ................................................................................... 17

4.5 VMware VMotion ........................................................................................................ 18

4.6 Site Recovery Manager (SRM)..................................................................................... 18

4.7 Virtual RecoverPoint Appliance .................................................................................. 19

5.0 Solution Architecture ........................................................................................ 21

5.1 Overview .................................................................................................................... 21

5.2 Solution Architecture RecoverPoint Key Components ................................................. 22

5.3 RPA Inventory List ...................................................................................................... 23

5.4 The Business Continuity Solution Designer ................................................................ 24

6.0 Solution Examples ........................................................................................... 26

6.1 Overview .................................................................................................................... 26

6.2 Example of a VSPEX Private Cloud Solution supporting up to 1000VMs with physical RecoverPoint appliance’s (RPA) .......................................................................... 26

6.3 Example of a VSPEX Private Cloud Solution supporting up to 300VMs with Virtual RecoverPoint appliance’s (vRPA) ........................................................................... 27

7.0 Preparations and Prerequisites ......................................................................... 29

7.1 Overview .................................................................................................................... 29

7.2 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 30

7.3 Networking requirements ........................................................................................... 31

7.4 System requirements ................................................................................................. 31

7.5 VNX Prerequisites ...................................................................................................... 32

7.6 Site Resource Manger Prerequisites ........................................................................... 33

8.0 Best Practices and Recommendations .............................................................. 34

8.1 Overview .................................................................................................................... 34

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8.2 Best Practices for Storage: ......................................................................................... 34

8.3 Best Practices for Host Connectivity: .......................................................................... 34

8.4 Best Practices for LAN Connectivity: ........................................................................... 35

8.5 Best Practices for SAN Connectivity: ........................................................................... 35

8.6 Best Practices for vRPA Virtualization ......................................................................... 36

8.7 Recommendations for VMware vCenter Site Resource Manager ................................. 37

9.0 VMware vCenter Implementation ...................................................................... 40

9.1 Overview .................................................................................................................... 40

9.2 Install the Site Resource Manager .............................................................................. 40

9.3 Install the SRM Client, VSI, and RecoverPoint SRA Plug-Ins ........................................ 43

9.4 Validate RecoverPoint health with Unisphere GUI ...................................................... 45

9.5 RecoverPoint Protection Tab ...................................................................................... 45

9.6 RecoverPoint Recovery Tab ........................................................................................ 47

9.7 Validating RecoverPoint RPA Clusters ......................................................................... 48

10.0 Completing the Implementation ..................................................................... 52

10.1 Overview .................................................................................................................. 52

10.2 Configuring RecoverPoint ......................................................................................... 52

10.3 Environment settings ............................................................................................... 53

10.4 Site-1 Name RPA Discovery ...................................................................................... 54

10.5 IP Addressing for Site-1 and Site-2 ........................................................................... 55

10.6 Apply Configuration ................................................................................................. 56

10.7 Storage Configuration – VNX login credentials ......................................................... 58

10.8 Storage Configuration – VNX login status ................................................................. 58

10.9 Storage Configuration – Zoning................................................................................ 59

10.10 Storage Configuration – SAN Diagnostics ............................................................... 60

10.11 Storage Configuration – Repository volume ........................................................... 60

10.12 Storage Configuration – Apply Configuration ......................................................... 61

10.13 RecoverPoint Install Summary................................................................................ 62

10.14 Creating local and remote copies of the VMware datastores .................................. 64

10.15 Configuring VMware for RecoverPoint .................................................................... 65

10.16 Configure SRM Servers at the Protected and Recovery Sites ................................... 65

10.17 Configure Array Managers ...................................................................................... 69

10.18 Understanding Protection Groups .......................................................................... 70

10.19 Create Array-Based Protection Groups ................................................................... 70

10.20 Create a Recovery Plan ........................................................................................... 72

11.0 Recovery Plans ............................................................................................... 75

11.1 Overview of Recovery Pans ....................................................................................... 75

11.2 Testing a Recovery Plan ........................................................................................... 75

11.3 Clean Up After Testing a Recovery Plan..................................................................... 78

11.4 Run a Recovery Plan ................................................................................................. 79

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11.5 Reprotect Virtual Machines ...................................................................................... 81

11.6 Protecting Against Local Data Loss and a Local Site Failure ...................................... 82

12.0 Application Consistency using KVSS Writers ................................................... 86

12.1 Create and Mark an Application-Consistent Point-In-Time ........................................ 86

12.2 Installing KVSS ........................................................................................................ 86

12.3 How to use KVSS to create and apply bookmarks: .................................................... 86

12.4 Benefits for using the VSS Writers: ........................................................................... 88

12.5 EMC AppSync for Protection Management: .............................................................. 89

13.0 Summary ....................................................................................................... 90

Appendix-A -- References ....................................................................................... 91

Appendix-B – Tech Refresh for RecoverPoint Hardware & Software .......................... 91

Appendix-C –RecoverPoint Limitations ................................................................... 94

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List of Figures Figure 1: RecoverPoint Local Replication ........................................................................................ 12

Figure 2: VSPEX Private Cloud components for RecoverPoint Local+Remote Replication ................ 13

Figure 3: RecoverPoint feature set .................................................................................................. 15

Figure 4: RecoverPoint Any Point-In-Time Recovery ........................................................................ 16

Figure 5: Integration with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) ...................................... 20

Figure 6: RecoverPoint Local Replication Architecture for a Single Site Datacenter ........................ 21

Figure 7: RecoverPoint CRR/CLR architecture for Multi-Site Environments ...................................... 22

Figure 8: RecoverPoint Gen5 Appliance – Rear View ...................................................................... 22

Figure 9: RecoverPoint Local Replication Connectivity Diagram ...................................................... 24

Figure 10: RecoverPoint Local+Remote Connectivity Diagram ........................................................ 24

Figure 11: Typical VSPEX Racked Components for Physical RecoverPoint Appliances ................... 26

Figure 12: Typical VSPEX Racked Components for Virtual RecoverPoint Appliances ....................... 27

Figure 13: RecoverPoint Planning Worksheets ............................................................................... 29

Figure 14: RecoverPoint Procedure Generator ................................................................................ 30

Figure 15: RecoverPoint Enabler for VNX ........................................................................................ 32

Figure 16: Storage Pool layout for 1000 virtual machines using VNX 5800 .................................... 38

Figure 17: SRM Installation Wizard ................................................................................................ 41

Figure 18: VMware vCenter SRM Extension .................................................................................... 43

Figure 19: VMware vCenter SRM Server Service ............................................................................. 43

Figure 20: EMC Virtual Storage Integrator Installer ......................................................................... 44

Figure 21: EMC Storage Replication Adapter for RecoverPoint ........................................................ 44

Figure 22: Installed Plugins for vCenter .......................................................................................... 44

Figure 23: Solutions and Application Extensions ........................................................................... 45

Figure 24: RecoverPoint Dashboard for Overall Health ................................................................... 45

Figure 25: RecoverPoint Protection for External Management ........................................................ 46

Figure 26: Replication Sets ............................................................................................................ 46

Figure 27: Status for Manage Protection ........................................................................................ 47

Figure 28: Recovery Options........................................................................................................... 47

Figure 29: RPA Cluster General Properties ...................................................................................... 48

Figure 30: RPA Cluster Splitters ...................................................................................................... 48

Figure 31: RPA Cluster Appliance Pairs ........................................................................................... 49

Figure 32: RPA Cluster vCenter Servers........................................................................................... 49

Figure 33: RecoverPoint Consistency Group Status ........................................................................ 50

Figure 34: Display Alert Warnings................................................................................................... 50

Figure 35: Unisphere Storage Provisioning screen ......................................................................... 51

Figure 36: DM Configuration File screen ......................................................................................... 52

Figure 37: DM Environmental Settings .......................................................................................... 54

Figure 38: DM RPA Discovery ......................................................................................................... 55

Figure 39: DM IP and Connectivity Settings ................................................................................... 56

Figure 40: DM Login Credentials .................................................................................................... 57

Figure 41: DM Applying Configuration Settings ............................................................................. 58

Figure 42: VNX Login Credentials .................................................................................................. 58

Figure 43: VNX Login Status Screen - SAN Diagnostics. ................................................................. 59

Figure 44: SAN Diagnostics ........................................................................................................... 60

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Figure 45: Repository Volumes ...................................................................................................... 61

Figure 46: Apply Configuration ...................................................................................................... 62

Figure 47: RPA Initiator WWNs ........................................................................................................ 62

Figure 48: VNX Storage Group ........................................................................................................ 63

Figure 49: Creating Local and Remote Copies of the VMware Datastores ...................................... 64

Figure 50: VSI Feature Manager ...................................................................................................... 65

Figure 51: VSI RecoverPoint Management ..................................................................................... 65

Figure 52: SRM Protected Sites ..................................................................................................... 65

Figure 53: vCenter Address and Port ............................................................................................. 66

Figure 54: vCenter Credentials ...................................................................................................... 67

Figure 55: Resource Mappings ...................................................................................................... 67

Figure 56: Folder Mappings ........................................................................................................... 67

Figure 57: Network Mappings ........................................................................................................ 68

Figure 58: Placeholder Datastores................................................................................................. 68

Figure 59: Array Managers ............................................................................................................. 69

Figure 60: Array Pairs .................................................................................................................... 70

Figure 61: Local and Remote Device Pairings ................................................................................ 70

Figure 62: Protection Groups ......................................................................................................... 70

Figure 63: Protected Site ............................................................................................................... 71

Figure 64: Datastore groups .......................................................................................................... 72

Figure 65: Recovery Plans ............................................................................................................. 72

Figure 66: Recovery Site ................................................................................................................ 73

Figure 67: Protection Groups ......................................................................................................... 73

Figure 68: Test Networks ............................................................................................................... 74

Figure 69: Recovery Plan Name and Description............................................................................ 74

Figure 70: Recovery Plan Options .................................................................................................. 75

Figure 71: Recovery Steps ............................................................................................................. 76

Figure 72: Starting a Test Copy ...................................................................................................... 76

Figure 73: Test Copy Confirmation ................................................................................................. 76

Figure 74: Test Copy Start.............................................................................................................. 77

Figure 75: Test Copy Progress ....................................................................................................... 77

Figure 76: Test Copy Completion ................................................................................................... 77

Figure 77: Clean-Up Session ......................................................................................................... 78

Figure 78: Starting a Clean-Up Session ......................................................................................... 78

Figure 79: Advanced Settings ........................................................................................................ 80

Figure 80: Recovery Types ............................................................................................................. 80

Figure 81: Forced Recovery ............................................................................................................ 81

Figure 82: Completed Recovery Plan ............................................................................................. 81

Figure 83: Re-Protecting the Recovered Site .................................................................................. 82

Figure 84: Consistency Groups ...................................................................................................... 82

Figure 85: Replication Sets ............................................................................................................ 83

Figure 86: CDP Copy with Journal Volumes .................................................................................... 83

Figure 87: Starting a Test Copy on a CDP Volume .......................................................................... 84

Figure 88: Selecting a Point-In-Time image for Testing .................................................................. 84

Figure 89: Completing the Test Copy ............................................................................................. 85

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List of Tables Table 1: Snapshot Consolidation Policies ...................................................................................... 16

Table 2: RecoverPoint Gen5 Components ...................................................................................... 23

Table 3: Average Sustained Throughput and IOPS per vRPA ......................................................... 27

Table 4: Network Requirements .................................................................................................... 31

Table 5: Hardware Resources for Storage ...................................................................................... 36

Table 6: Zoning Information for Fabric-A and Fabric-B ................................................................... 63

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1.0 Executive Summary

Businesses face many challenges in delivering application availability, while working within constrained IT budgets. Increased deployment of virtualization lowers costs and increase availability, but alone will not allow businesses to provide the required application access demanded by users. This document provides an overview of RecoverPoint, the use cases, and how combining the VSPEX Private Cloud with RecoverPoint solutions will provide the continuous data protection and replication services required for today’s business applications. This document is divided into sections that give an overview of the RecoverPoint family and use cases, the VSPEX with RecoverPoint solution architecture and how RecoverPoint extends VMware capabilities and solution requirements with configuration details. The EMC® RecoverPoint™ family versions are Local, Remote, or Local+Remote replication. Each level of protection provides massive scalability with continuous replication to help efficiently protect critical data anywhere in the world from physical or logical failure. EMC RecoverPoint fulfills many use cases for VSPEX configurations including local and/or remote Any Point-In-Time operational recovery.

VMware vSphere makes it simpler and less expensive to provide higher levels of availability for important applications. With vSphere, organizations can easily increase the baseline level of availability provided for all applications, as well as provide higher levels of availability more easily and cost-effectively.

RecoverPoint extends VMware vMotion, HA, and SRM stretching the VMware cluster across

distance providing solutions that go beyond traditional “Disaster Recovery” by providing Any Point-In-Time recovery for Site Resource Manager.

Solution requirements for software and hardware, material lists, step-by-step sizing

guidance and worksheets, and verified deployment steps to implement a RecoverPoint solution with a VSPEX Private Cloud solution that supports up to 1000 Virtual Machines.

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2.0 Background and RecoverPoint Overview

2.1 Document purpose This document is an initial introduction to using RecoverPoint to leverage VSPEX Proven Infrastructure explaining how to modify the architecture for specific engagements, and instructions on how to effectively deploy and monitor the overall system. This document applies to VSPEX deployed with EMC RecoverPoint Local + Remote Replication. The details provided in this white paper are based on the following configurations:

RecoverPoint 4.0 or higher RecoverPoint Local + Remote Replication VMware vSphere 5.5 or later are used VNX5400, VNX5600 and VNX5800 storage arrays Please refer to the VSPEX Private Cloud for VMware Proven Infrastructure Guide EMC Simple Support Matrix (ESSM) found here:

https://elabnavigator.emc.com/vault/pdf/EMC_RecoverPoint.pdf

2.2 Target Audience The readers of this document should have the necessary training and background to install and configure VMware vSphere, EMC® VNX® series storage systems, RecoverPoint, and associated infrastructure as required by this implementation. External references are provided where applicable, and the readers should be familiar with these documents. After purchase, implementers of this solution should focus on the configuration guidelines of the solution validation phase and the appropriate references and appendices.

2.3 Business Challenges Most of today’s organizations operate 24x7, with most applications being mission-critical. Continuous availability of these applications to all users is a primary goal of any IT organization. A secondary goal is to have all applications up and running as soon as possible if the applications stop processing. There are hundreds of possibilities that can cause infrastructure to be taken down - from fires, flooding, natural disasters, application failures, data corruption/deletion or even just simple mistakes that may happen in the computer room. Sometimes there are good reasons to take down applications for scheduled maintenance, tech refreshes, load balancing, or data center relocation. In all of these scenarios the outcome is the same, applications stop processing. The ultimate goal of the IT organization is to maintain mission critical application availability.

https://elabnavigator.emc.com/vault/pdf/EMC_VPLEX.pdf

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3.0 RecoverPoint Solution VSPEX with RecoverPoint utilizing best-of-breed technologies delivers the power, performance and reliability businesses need to be competitive. VSPEX solutions are built with proven best-of-breed technologies to create complete virtualization solutions that enable you to make an informed decision in the hypervisor, server, and networking layers. Business applications are moving into consolidated compute, network, and storage environments. EMC VSPEX Private Cloud using VMware reduces the complexity of configuring every component of a traditional deployment model. The complexity of integration management is reduced while maintaining the application design and implementation options. VSPEX coupled with RecoverPoint enhances the VSPEX value proposition by providing a comprehensive data protection solution for enterprise and commercial customers, providing integrated continuous local and remote data protection and replication to recover applications to any point in time. RecoverPoint systems enable reliable replication locally with one RPA/vRPA cluster, and over any distance to up to four remote RPA/vRPA clusters. RecoverPoint systems support replication of data that applications are writing to SAN-attached storage using existing Fibre Channel (FC) and iSCSI infrastructure to integrate seamlessly with existing host applications and data storage subsystems. For remote replication, the systems use existing connections to send the replicated data over FC and/or WAN, and uses FC and/or IP infrastructure to replicate data asynchronously or synchronously. The systems provide failover of operations to another cluster in the event of a disaster at the production cluster. The following sections describes how the RecoverPoint Local, Remote, and Local+Remote configurations deliver the value propositions listed above as part of a EMC VSPEX Private Cloud solution for up to 1000 Virtual Machine’s.

3.1 RecoverPoint Continuous Local Data Protection RecoverPoint Local Replication use a methodology that continuously captures or tracks data modifications and stores changes independent of the primary data, enabling recovery points from any point in the past. Local Replication also provides fine granularities of restorations to infinitely variable recovery points. Local Replication incorporates three fundamental attributes:

Data changes are continuously captured or tracked. All data changes are stored on separate disks from the primary storage. Recovery point objectives are arbitrary and need not be defined in advance of the actual

recovery.

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RecoverPoint can instantly recover data to a Point-In-Time (PIT) by leveraging bookmarks from the replica journal. By definition, writes from the splitter to the RPA are written synchronously, and granularity of one million snapshots, so the exact data size and contents are ultimately dependent upon the number of writes made by the host application per second. Users can change the snapshot granularity to per write, if necessary. Users can also set the replication mode to synchronous, when an RPO time of zero is required.

Figure 1: RecoverPoint Local Replication

Note: Figure 1: RecoverPoint Local Replication depicts a local replication configuration; physically the RPA’s may be hosted within the VSPEX rack.

3.2 RecoverPoint Remote Replication RecoverPoint Remote Replication is a configuration where data is transferred between two sites over Fibre Channel or a WAN communications. In this configuration, the RPAs, storage and splitters exist at both the local and the remote sites. The default mode for replication mode is asynchronous, and snapshot granularity is dynamic, so the exact RPO and RTO are dependent upon resource availability and system performance. This provides crash-consistent protection based on the applications write activity and enables recovery to specific points in time. With RecoverPoint 4.0 synchronous replication is now supported when both the local and remote sites are connected through Fibre Channel or IP; see EMC RecoverPoint Release Notes for a complete set of rules and other limitations.

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Figure 2: VSPEX Private Cloud components for RecoverPoint Local+Remote Replication

Note: The above image depicts a two-site RecoverPoint Local + Remote configuration; physically the RPA’s may be hosted within the VSPEX rack.

3.3 RecoverPoint Local+Remote Replication RecoverPoint Local+Remote Replication provides Continuous Local and Remote Replication. Or more specifically a RecoverPoint configuration that includes both a Local and a Remote copy, providing concurrent local and remote data protection. In RecoverPoint, the Local copy is normally used for operational recovery, while the Remote copy is normally used for disaster recovery. Local+Remote Replication features bi-directional replication and any PIT recovery mechanism which enables replica volumes to be rolled back to a previous PIT and used for read/write operations without effecting the ongoing replication process or data protection. Local and Remote Replication is a three-copy configuration and may include both RPAs and/or vRPAs which are a core capabilities of RecoverPoint.

Physical RecoverPoint Appliances for Local and Remote Replication (RPA) Virtual RecoverPoint Appliances for Local and Remote Replication (vRPA) Combination of RPA (local) and vRPA (remote) equipment.

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4.0 Solutions Overview The EMC VSPEX Private Cloud for VMware vSphere 5.5 integrated with EMC RecoverPoint represents the next-generation architecture for continuous data protection for mission-critical applications. This architecture is based on EMC‘s 20+years of expertise in designing; implementing and perfecting enterprise class intelligent cache and distributed data protection solutions. The combined VSPEX with RecoverPoint solution provides complete protection of applications that run in the private cloud against many possible disaster scenarios. Using RecoverPoint helps ensure resiliency against failures within the datacenter infrastructure. RecoverPoint supports Any-Application, at Any-Distance, from Any-Point-In-Time provisioned across Any-Storage (with VPLEX) to offer Continuous Protection within and across your datacenters.

RecoverPoint addresses the following distinct customer requirements:

Near Zero RPO’s: Single Solution for Local and Remote Protection

Any PiT for VMware SRM: Reduces costs through: Bandwidth reduction, Synchronous and Asynchronous links over IP, and User-Installable.

QOS: RecoverPoint provides better service levels to provide remote async replication with a priority for each consistency group that includes bandwidth and priority with data lag optimization. Also important is making sure that providing priority for one or more consistency groups does not cause undesired effects to other consistency groups.

Capacity On Demand: RecoverPoint supports capacity on demand by allowing the Administrator to easily add additional consistency groups for any application or to expand existing consistency groups as existing applications grow their compute or storage resources.

Service-Level Management: RecoverPoint supports replicating your data across any distance up to 200ms latency. Replication can be synchronous or asynchronous depending on latency and it can be over IP or over FC. Starting with RP 4.0, synchronous replication is supported over IP up to 10ms RTT. In addition to standardized alert reporting, RecoverPoint also monitors VM storage resources for business continuity protection and will alert the administrator if this protection status changes.

Highly available components: VSPEX configurations are built from high-availability components that provide enterprise-class reliability without compromising security, performance, or scalability. RecoverPoint enhances these built-in availability features, by providing continuous data protection from infrastructure failure, local or regional disasters, and/or data corruption. RecoverPoint is a continuous replication solution that captures all production writes and then journals those writes to a target replica. The journal is used to distribute those captured PiT images as well as allowing users to roll forward or backward to a selected image. The following section shows the advantages of deploying RecoverPoint.

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4.1 Operational Recovery and Disaster Recovery EMC RecoverPoint preserves a record of the write transactions that takes place with the environment, providing crash- or application-consistent recovery points within the VSPEX environment. For local replication, RecoverPoint captures every application write and preserves them in their respective local journals. For remote replication, RecoverPoint also captures every application write and groups them based on user-specified policies, with write changes preserved in a journal at the remote site.

Figure 3: RecoverPoint feature set

This preservation of application writes to PiT images guarantees recovery from a snapshot copy of the application data even if the original data is lost or corrupted from a server failure, virus, Trojan horse, software errors, or end-user errors. For local and remote recovery, the recovery point is to the previous write. Using RecoverPoint the data can be immediately accessed and mounted back to production environments in seconds—much less time than with disk-based snapshots, disk or tape backups, or archives. The integration of local and remote replication protects application data against catastrophic events that can bring entire data centers to a standstill. RecoverPoint allows local and remote replication with no application degradation. As a result, organizations and service providers alike can deploy private or public clouds in geographically dispersed data centers giving protection from local or regional failure or disaster. RecoverPoint will protect against combinations of disasters, including data corruption and hardware failures, as well as cascading disasters. Every time the application writes to the local storage, the splitter will mark the changed blocks in the production journal. Should a there be any interruption in service between clusters, then only the marked blocks are transferred when the communication issues have been resolved. This enables quick recovery from array failure and/or complete site failure and the ability to roll back to any point in time within the protection window configured for the application.

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4.2 Application Aware Bookmarking Each application replicated by RecoverPoint has a corresponding history log that enables recovery to any point in time for all volumes associated with the application. This crash-consistent recovery is performed as if the application server had crashed and had to be recovered from data resident on the storage. For application-awareness, agents or customized scripts are used to place the application into hot backup mode, and once in this mode a bookmark is written into the RecoverPoint journal to show that the specific image represents an application-consistent recovery point. EMC offers agents for Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft SQL Server that integrate these applications with RecoverPoint. By using these agents, an administrator can be assured that an application restore can be immediately mounted and the application restarted. The administrator also can select a specific point in time to roll back and forward, as needed. Recovery can occur at the local or remote disaster recovery site and is a very effective way to perform disaster recovery tests or fire drills. This powerful capability allows creation of time-based and transactional-consistent images at any point in time without impacting the production image and/or on-going replication. Another option that is available at the point of the Consistency Group creation is the ability to enable Automatic Snapshot Consolidations. This will allow you to manage plus schedule the consolidation of daily, weekly, and monthly snapshots.

Figure 4: RecoverPoint Any Point-In-Time Recovery

Table 1: Snapshot Consolidation Policies

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4.3 VMware vCenter Server VCenter Server provides centralized management of virtualized hosts and virtual machines from a single console. It gives administrators deep visibility into the configuration of the critical components of a virtual infrastructure—all from one place. With vCenter Server, virtual environments are easier to manage: a single administrator can manage hundreds of workloads, more than doubling typical productivity when managing physical infrastructure. Key capabilities enabled by vCenter Server include:

VMware vSphere vMotion® VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler™ VMware vSphere High Availability (HA) VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance

With automated proactive management, vCenter Server allows service levels to be met by dynamically provisioning new services, balancing resources and automating high availability.

With vCenter, maintenance actions can now be performed with minimal downtime for the VMware vCenter Server instance. Patches can be applied to the passive host through its unique IP without affecting the active host. The VMware vCenter Server instance can then be failed over from the active server to the passive server in preparation for patching the active server. In the event that the maintenance activity causes an issue with a host, admins can simply fail the VMware vCenter Server instance back to the other host until the problem is resolved.

4.4 EMC Virtual Storage Integrator Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) is an EMC-developed plug-in to the VMware® vCenter™ management software. VSI allows the VMware administrator to provision, monitor, and manage VMware vSphere datastores on EMC storage arrays. It will ease the management of the virtualized environment. This plug-in supports all EMC arrays including EMC VNX®, VNXe®, Symmetrix® VMAX® 10K, VMAX 20K, VMAX 40K, VPLEX® and Celerra® systems. It is available for customers at no charge. Features are managed by using the VSI Feature Manager. VSI provides a unified user experience, allowing each of the features to be updated independently, and new features to be introduced rapidly in response to changing customer requirements. Examples of features available for VSI are Storage Viewer, Path Management, Symmetrix storage replication adapter (SRA) Utilities, Unified Storage Management, and AppSync™ Management.

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4.5 VMware VMotion VMotion enables you to move mission-critical workloads between members of a vCenter Cluster without any downtime. vMotion is a key enabling technology for creating the dynamic, automated, and self-optimizing data center. This application makes it possible to service hardware and software without missing a beat so that you can configure, manage, maintain, and update your production applications without the risk of the application going offline. For maintaining high availability, vMotion enables you to:

Perform hardware maintenance without scheduled downtime Proactively migrate virtual machines away from failing or underperforming servers Keep your resources optimized to align with business priorities

The migration of a virtual machine with VMotion preserves the precise execution state, the network identity, and the active network connections. As a result, there is zero downtime and no disruption to the user. This ensures that your production applications remain online, even under conditions in which a non-virtualized instance of the application becomes unavailable. This is especially helpful in managing workloads in your VSPEX Private Cloud environment by enabling transparent VM movement between datastores and hosts.

4.6 Site Recovery Manager (SRM) VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is a pioneering disaster-recovery manager and automation solution for VMware vSphere. SRM accelerates recovery by automating the recovery process and simplifying disaster-recovery plan management by integrating disaster recovery with the management of your VMware virtual infrastructure. It also ensures reliable recovery by eliminating complex manual recovery steps and by enabling non-disruptive recovery plan testing. SRM integrates tightly with VMware vSphere, VMware vCenter Server, and storage replication to make failover and recovery rapid, reliable, affordable, and manageable. It enables organizations to take the risk and worry out of disaster recovery and to expand protection to all their systems and applications. RecoverPoint’s added value to VMware SRM is that while SRM users could only recover from LATEST image, SRM with RecoverPoint users can recover from ANY point in time - no other solution offers this level of protection integrated with VMware SRM. Please refer to the EMC RecoverPoint Simple Support Matrix for the most current information for design, configuration, and implementations.

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4.7 Virtual RecoverPoint Appliance Starting with RecoverPoint 4.0, EMC supports the RecoverPoint solution using either physical RecoverPoint Appliances (RPAs) or Virtual RecoverPoint Appliances (vRPAs). Each platform will have its own characteristics and it should be noted that RPAs will almost always outperform vRPAs. The difference between using physical and/or virtual RPAs in your environment is negligible and should always be properly sized and vetted using the Business Continuity Sizing Tool (BCSD). The following is a list of vRPA characteristics:

vRPAs are free of charge vRPAs are delivered as an Open Virtualization Format (OVF) vRPAs require iSCSI connectivity vRPAs require VNX5400 (or higher) splitters with iSCSI adapters vRPAs require the VNX to be at target Flare level (Inyo MR1) to support the iSCSI vRPAs using iSCSI provide support for VMWare’s VMotion, HA and DRS. vRPAs require 4 interfaces each:

o (1)WAN o (1)LAN o (2)iSCSI

vRPAs only support replication over IP. (Synchronous replication up 10ms) vRPAs when deployed with the highest memory and CPU configuration. vRPAs support deduplication as long as the vRPAs has 8GB of RAM. vRPAs in RP/EX or RP/CL support connecting to multiple physical or virtual RPA clusters. vRPAs Clusters don’t support Distributed Consistency Groups. vRPAs clusters can also connect to multiple VNX arrays.

While deploying vRPAs, the best source of information will be the RecoverPoint Procedure Generator coupled with the current RecoverPoint Release Notes and RecoverPoint Deployment Manager. These utilities will provide all prerequisites, requirements, and expectations while designing and deploying your RecoverPoint vRPAs. Note: It’s recommended that vRPA1 and vRPA2 not run on the same ESXi server. Note: When using vRPA cluster(s) in RP/EX or RP/CL consider supported multisite topologies as well as total number of replication sets that the system supports. For more information refer to latest RecoverPoint Release Notes and RecoverPoint vRPA Technical Note.

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Figure 5: Integration with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM)

EMC RecoverPoint Storage Replication Adapter for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRA) allows VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to implement disaster recovery using EMC RecoverPoint. RecoverPoint Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) supports SRM functions such as failing over, failing back, and failover testing using RecoverPoint as the replication engine. RecoverPoint SRA 2.0 supports VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Server 5.0 and later with RecoverPoint 3.4 SP1 and later. RecoverPoint SRA 2.2 is a 64-bit application that supports VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Server 5.1 and later with RecoverPoint 3.5 SP1 and later. Site Recovery Manager 4.X is not supported with RecoverPoint 4.0 and later. Another feature worth a look is the ability to fail over to any point-in-time image using EMC Virtual Storage Integrator 5.5. This plug-in allows you to select the desired image from within vCenter.

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5.0 Solution Architecture 5.1 Overview The VSPEX Private Cloud solution for VMware vSphere with EMC VNX and EMC RecoverPoint has been validated for configurations up to 1000 virtual machines.

Figure 6: RecoverPoint Local Replication Architecture for a Single Site Datacenter

Figure-6 characterizes a single-site infrastructure with block storage within a single datacenter, Figure-7 illustrates a distributed infrastructure validated with block storage located at two separate datacenters. Where 8GB FC carries storage traffic locally, and 10GB Ethernet carries storage, management, and application traffic across datacenter sites.

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Figure 7: RecoverPoint CRR/CLR architecture for Multi-Site Environments

5.2 Solution Architecture RecoverPoint Key Components

Figure 8: RecoverPoint Gen5 Appliance – Rear View

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5.3 RPA Inventory List This architecture includes the following RecoverPoint technology: Table 2: RecoverPoint Gen5 Components

RPA Components Description

Processor Speed 2.0 GHz

Processor Type 2.00 GHz E5-2620/95W 6C

# Processors 2

Memory Module Size (GB) 4GB

# of Memory Modules 4

Memory speed 1333 or Greater

Total Memory per CPU 8GB

Total Memory per SKU 16GB

Optical Drive DVD ROM

Disk type 2.5” SAS 10K

Disk capacity 300 GB

Raid formatted RAID1 Pair

Qty of Disks 2

# of Power Supply 2

PCIe Slot 1 QLogic 2564 4-port 8GB FC Card (QLE25654-WB)

PCIe Slot 2 Empty

RecoverPoint uses RecoverPoint appliances (RPAs) in the storage network to perform all aspects of the local and remote replication and recovery. The RPA is installed in the same SAN as the source storage and target storage. During remote asynchronous replication, an RPA at the source site makes intelligent decisions regarding when and what data to transfer to the target site. The RPA at the target site distributes the data to the target-site storage. During recovery, the RPA at the recovery site is responsible for performing the recovery operations. RecoverPoint clusters are deployed with a minimum of two RPAs at each site. This pair of RPA’s will form a RecoverPoint cluster. Additional RPAs may be added to an existing cluster, with up to eight RPAs supported per site. RecoverPoint local replication has only one site so additional RPAs can be added one at a time. Please refer to the RecoverPoint Release Notes for the most current design considerations as well as the Appendix for a list of relevant technical notes and/or white papers. Configurations that include RecoverPoint remote replication involve two or more clusters, so additional RPAs are added in parallel at each site. Figure 9: RecoverPoint Local Replication Connectivity Diagram shows an environment with RecoverPoint Local Replication only, virtualizing the storage and providing high availability across storage arrays. Since all ESXi servers are all transparently integrated into the RecoverPoint solution; VMware vMotion, HA, and DRS are able to seamlessly move and be restarted on all hosts.

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Figure 9: RecoverPoint Local Replication Connectivity Diagram

Figure 10: RecoverPoint Local+Remote Connectivity Diagram

5.4 The Business Continuity Solution Designer EMC’s Business Continuity Solution Designer (BCSD) is an application specifically designed for EMC Global Services personnel, EMC business partners, and select EMC customers whose purpose is to analyze and design new and existing environments for remote replication. By automating the design and sizing tasks, BCSD significantly reduces the time spent on these tasks. BCSD is an application based on Java and utilizes Microsoft SQL Server database technologies. It has been specifically designed to create and manage project configurations, import and map performance data, and then analyze and model that data based on a user proposed configuration. Once modeled, the results are viewable from either the GUI or by generating reports.

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Users of BCSD are expected to be knowledgeable in the features and configuration of supported EMC remote replication products such as RecoverPoint.

Create and manage high-level customer configurations: Sites Arrays RecoverPoint Clusters Switches Network Circuits Physical Relationships Logical Relationships (RPO, Protection Window, Compression, Snapshot Consolidation, etc.)

Importing of array and host level performance data:

VNX/Unified NAR (raw) VMware esxtop Windows Perfmon CSV (raw BLG data is not supported)

Analyze and model performance data based on user proposed configuration:

Modeling properties summarize the results Charts graph the results Volume Exceptions warn users of potential hot spots and possible corrupted data

Generate reports:

Analysis Summaries for reviewing and sharing the results Risk Assessments for determining the level of risk for the proposed environment User defined report (per physical relationship)

The BCSD Tools may be downloaded here: https://elabadvisor.emc.com/app/licensedtools/list

https://elabadvisor.emc.com/app/licensedtools/list

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6.0 Solution Examples 6.1 Overview This chapter discusses two separate environments that have been setup and configured for a VSPEX Private Cloud solution for VMware. The first environment will support up to 1000 virtual machines while using physical RecoverPoint appliances. The second environment will support up 300 virtual machines using a virtual RecoverPoint appliance.

6.2 Example of a VSPEX Private Cloud Solution supporting up to 1000VMs with physical RecoverPoint appliance’s (RPA) RecoverPoint is an intelligent data protection and recovery solution that runs on out-of-band appliances that will attach to your SAN and IP networks. RecoverPoint uses your enterprise’s existing network and storage systems to create and maintain Local and Remote copies of your production data. These local and remotes copies will be maintained on separate LUNs at either (or both) the Local or Remote sites. Another component to consider is the Copy journals that are dedicated to holding point-in-time information for each image on the production storage, as well as bookmarks that mark significant points in time. The copy journals hold all changes to data, so that the copy storage can be rolled back to a previous point in time (PIT). There are as many copy journals as there are local and remote copies in a consistency group. To prepare for deployment, you should be familiar with how the RecoverPoint system integrates with your existing systems.

Figure 11: Typical VSPEX Racked Components for Physical RecoverPoint Appliances

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6.3 Example of a VSPEX Private Cloud Solution supporting up to 300VMs with Virtual RecoverPoint appliance’s (vRPA) Virtual RPA (vRPA) with VNX splitter vRPA is a virtual RPA that runs as a virtual machine on VMware ESXi servers. Almost all RPA functionality is available in vRPA with little or no restrictions. Instead of HBAs and Fibre Channel, the vRPA uses iSCSI over a standard IP network; therefore, there are no hardware requirements for the vRPA other than a standard ESXi server. While deploying vRPAs, the best source of information will be the RecoverPoint Procedure Generator coupled with the current RecoverPoint Release Notes and RecoverPoint Deployment Manager. These utilities will provide all prerequisites, requirements, and expectations while designing and deploying your RecoverPoint vRPAs.

Figure 12: Typical VSPEX Racked Components for Virtual RecoverPoint Appliances

Table 3: Average Sustained Throughput and IOPS per vRPA

vRPA Profile Throughput (MB/s) IOPS

(8)CPU (8)GB RAM 80 10000

(4)CPU (8)GB RAM 65 6500

(2)CPU (4)GB RAM 50 4500

The difference between using physical and/or virtual RPAs in your environment is negligible and should always be properly sized and vetted using the Business Continuity Sizing Tool (BCSD). The following are examples of things to consider while sizing your RecoverPoint environment:

1) Throughput and IOPS increase linearly with the number of RPAs depending on the splitter’s performance.

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2) Async replication of distributed consistency groups with vRPA’s support throughputs of up to 400 MB/s.

3) The maximum incoming writes with vRPA’s depends on ESXi Memory, Host CPU, Ports, and Speed.

4) Physical RPA’s can support much more throughput than vRPAs.

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7.0 Preparations and Prerequisites

7.1 Overview The RecoverPoint pre-deployment gathering of data consists of the items listed below. The first phase is to collect all appropriate site data and fill out the configuration worksheets. These worksheets may be found under the Services section of Powerlink. http://powerlink.emc.com Services -> SPD TS Kits and Service Offerings -> TS Kits -> RecoverPoint

Figure 13: RecoverPoint Planning Worksheets

The RecoverPoint Procedure Generator will be used to create a detailed list of installation procedures and to set expectations for the entire installation process. The Procedure Generator may be found here: http://www.cs.isus.emc.com/csweb2/proc_gen.htm

-or-

https://download.emc.com/downloads/DL38195_RecoverPoint_Procedure_Generator_-_Service-Facing.exe

http://powerlink.emc.com/

http://www.cs.isus.emc.com/csweb2/proc_gen.htm

https://download.emc.com/downloads/DL38195_RecoverPoint_Procedure_Generator_-_Service-Facing.exe

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Figure 14: RecoverPoint Procedure Generator

7.2 Introduction The RecoverPoint Deployment Manager contains the Installer Wizard for RecoverPoint. This graphical user interface (GUI) wizard helps you install a new RecoverPoint or update an existing RecoverPoint configuration from a single management point. Each of the RecoverPoint products are grouped by cost, features, and licensing options as follows:

Option RecoverPoint/SE RecoverPoint/EX RecoverPoint/CL

Supported Splitters: VNX VNX and VPLEX VNX and VPLEX

Number of Supported

Arrays:

One Array per Cluster, Up to Two RPA Clusters

Up to five RPA Clusters Up to five RPA Clusters

License based on: Per Storage Array (full capacity)

VNX: Per Storage Array Per replicated capacity. Local and

Remote licenses require separate licenses.

VPLEX: Per Registered Capacity

License Tied to:

Storage Array Serial Numbers

Storage Array Serial Numbers

Software Serial ID's (SSID)

As the VSPEX Private Cloud configuration shown in this document is using the VNX5800, we will use the RecoverPoint/SE Installer as it was designed specifically for array-based splitters on VNX series environments. Using the Deployment Manager RecoverPoint/SE Installer Wizard is a prerequisite for using the RecoverPoint/SE for Unisphere management console.

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Note: The Unisphere console cannot manage RecoverPoint/SE clusters that may have been installed by others means. About the RecoverPoint/SE Installer Wizard The RecoverPoint/SE Installer supports all RecoverPoint/SE layouts that use the VNX:

One cluster installation for Local replication Two cluster installation for Local, Remote, and Local+Remote replication between two sites

7.3 Networking requirements To perform an installation using the RecoverPoint/SE Installer, the installation station you are working on must be able to communicate with the RPAs. If you are performing a two cluster installation, you must have communication between the installation station and the RPAs at both clusters. Table 4: Network Requirements

Cluster-1 Management IP Network

Cluster-2 Management IP Network

Mgt Subnet Mask 255.255.248.0 Mgt Subnet Mask 255.255.248.0

Mgt Gateway 10.108.64.1 Mgt Gateway 10.108.64.1

Mgt Site IP Address (VIP) https://10.108.70.56 Mgt Site IP Address (VIP) https://10.108.70.57

RPA 1 Mgt Box IP Address 10.108.70.96 RPA 1 Mgt Box IP Address 10.108.70.98

RPA 2 Mgt Box IP Address 10.108.70.97 RPA 2 Mgt Box IP Address 10.108.70.99

Cluster-1 WAN IP Network

Cluster-2 WAN IP Network

WAN Subnet Mask 255.255.255.0 WAN Subnet Mask 255.255.255.0

WAN Gateway 192.168.1.1 WAN Gateway 192.168.2.1

RPA 1 WAN IP Address 192.169.100.100 RPA 1 WAN IP Address 192.169.100.102

RPA 2 WAN IP Address 192.169.100.101 RPA 2 WAN IP Address 192.169.100.103

7.4 System requirements To use the RecoverPoint/SE Installer Wizard, you must have: A version of Java™ 6 (update 13 or higher) installed on the computer you are performing the

installation from. It is highly recommended to have the latest Java 6 update installed. A Telnet/SSH connection to Cisco and Brocade switches, in order to perform automatic zoning. All RPAs must be Gen 4 or later.

o RPA’s requiring code upgrades require the ISO image o vRPA’s requiring code upgrades require the OVA/OVF files

https://10.108.70.56/

https://10.108.70.57/

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7.5 VNX Prerequisites Before continuing, ensure the following conditions are met on your environment. If any of the conditions are not fulfilled, close the wizard, fulfill the conditions, and then run the wizard again.

Production hosts are configured to work with VNX arrays and have SAN connectivity. The compatible VNX related software for this RecoverPoint/SE version is installed and

enabled. Download and reference the latest EMC Simple Support Matrix for RecoverPoint (RP-ESSM) as

well as any contributing Tech Notes and/or White Papers that apply to this Private Cloud solution. (see appendix)

Figure 15: RecoverPoint Enabler for VNX

RPAs are rack mounted. RPA and VNX storage processors are connected to fabrics and switches to ensure high

availability. All RPAs are connected to SAN and Ethernet network. RPAs are loaded with the same RecoverPoint/SE ISO image. RPAs are set with IP addresses (including an address from a DHCP server).

For information regarding the recommended physical connections between RPAs, storage, and switches, refers to the EMC RecoverPoint Deployment Manager Product Guide.

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7.6 Site Resource Manger Prerequisites The RecoverPoint system must be installed and configured before the EMC RecoverPoint Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) can be installed. For instructions for installing and configuring RecoverPoint, refer to the EMC RecoverPoint Deployment Manager Product Guide for your version of RecoverPoint. To identify the RecoverPoint SRA release compatible with a specific release of RecoverPoint, refer to the EMC Support Matrix. Before the EMC RecoverPoint Storage Replication Adapter 2.X or later can be installed, all of the following must be completed:

RecoverPoint 4.0 SP1 (for SRA 2.2) installed and configured. VMware vCenter 5.5 (for SRA 2.2) installed and configured. VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Server 5.5 (for SRA 2.2). VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Extension plug-in installed and configured.

RecoverPoint Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) requires Java Runtime Environment (JRE) Version 6 Update 7 or later to be installed on the vCenter Servers. For VMware system requirements, refer to the VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.X Administration Guide.

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8.0 Best Practices and Recommendations 8.1 Overview This chapter discusses aspects of planning and deployment pertaining to RecoverPoint and why ignoring sizing, scalability and best practice deployment could lead to the early onset of adverse behavior and performance degradation. It also shows how to get more out of your investment and make the environment more efficient by adopting some simple best practice processes and principles. For this paper we will make the assumption that the VSPEX environment has been setup and has been configured for a Private Cloud that supports up to 1000 virtual machines. The RecoverPoint clusters have been configured to support CDP, CRR, and CLR. Now we will start applying our best practices and recommendations.

8.2 Best Practices for Storage: Dual fabric designs for fabric redundancy and HA should be implemented to avoid a single

point of failure. This provides data access even in the event of a full fabric outage. Each RecoverPoint appliance will physically connect to both fabrics. Fabric zoning should consist of a set of zones a single initiator and up to 16 targets Avoid port speed issues between the fabric and RecoverPoint by using dedicated port

speeds taking special care not to use oversubscribed ports on SAN switches Knowing how RecoverPoint handles I/O’s:

1. Host sends write to storage 2. Embedded Splitter intercepts write 3. RPA acknowledges the write 4. Splitter sends write to storage 5. Storage acknowledge the write 6. Splitter acknowledges the write

8.3 Best Practices for Host Connectivity: Dual fabric designs are considered a best practice Each host should have a minimum of two physical connections one to each fabric

(required). Each host should have at least one path to each Service Processor; one path to SPa and one

path to SPb on each fabric for a total of (4) logical paths (required for NDU). Maximum availability for host connectivity is achieved by using hosts with multiple HBA’s. Multipathing or path failover software is required at the host for access across the dual

fabrics. Four paths are required for NDU (Example: Fabric-A=SPa0/SPb0 and Fabric-B=SPa1/SPb1) Observe Director CPU utilization and schedule NDU for times when average

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8.4 Best Practices for LAN Connectivity: Requires an IPv4 Address for the management server Management Server is configured for Auto Negotiate (1Gbps NIC) VPN connectivity between management servers requires a routable/pingable connection

between each cluster. Network QoS must be able to handle file transfers during the NDU procedure The following Firewall ports must be opened:

o Internet Key Exchange (IKE): UDP port 500 o NAT Traversal in the IKE (IPsec NAT-T): UDP port 4500 o Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP): IP protocol number 50 o Authentication Header (AH): IP protocol number 51 o Secure Shell (SSH) and Secure Copy (SCP): TCP port 22

Note: For a detailed list of LAN/WAN requirements see: RecoverPoint Security Configuration Guide

8.5 Best Practices for SAN Connectivity: This section provides guidelines for setting up the storage layer of the solution to provide high-availability and the expected level of performance. The tested solutions described below use block storage via Fiber Channel. The storage layout described below adheres to all current best practices. A customer or architect with the necessary training and background can make modifications based on their understanding of the system usage and load if required. However, the building blocks described in this document ensure acceptable performance. The VSPEX storage building blocks document specifies recommendations for customization.

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Table 5: Hardware Resources for Storage

Component Configuration EMC VNX Array Block Common:

2 x 10GbE optical interface for iSCSI (1 per SP) 1 x 1 GbE interface per Control Station for Mgmt 1 x 1 GbE interface per SP for Mgmt 2 front end ports per SP System disks for VNX OE 377 x 600 GB 15k rpm 3.5-inch SAS drives 17 x 200 GB Flash drives plus (4)for FAST-Cache 2 x 600 GB 15k rpm 3.5-inch SAS drives as HS 1 x 200 GB Flash drive as a hot spare Minimum Journal Size = 10GB (non-distributed CG) Minimum Journal Size = 40GB (distributed CG) Maximum Journal Size per CG = 10TB

EMC RecoverPoint Site-1_Cluster

RDU_Cluster-1:

(1) LAN Port

(1) WAN Port

(1) Management Port

(4) Fiber Channel Ports

EMC RecoverPoint Site-2_Cluster

ATL_Cluster-2:

(1) LAN Port

(1) WAN Port

(1) Management Port

(4) Fiber Channel Ports

8.6 Best Practices for vRPA Virtualization

If multiple vRPAs share same vSphere host: vRPAs should not share the same ESXi server. In other words there should never be two vRPAs running on the same ESXi server. There should also be at least two ESXi servers per cluster, to allow redundancy in case an ESXi server fails, but if it becomes necessary that vRPAs must run on the same host (temporarily) then sufficient resources must be made available:

CPU and memory:total resources available on a sherd host must be the sum of resources required by each of the individual vRPAs on the server.

Network bandwidth must be sufficient to handle the I/O’s of all RPAs.

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Configuring virtual networks for vRPA:

In low-traffic deployments, all four network cards may be placed on the same virtual network (on a single vSwitch).

Where high performance is desired, separate LAN and WAN traffic from iSCSI traffic. For even better performance, place each network (LAN, WAN, iSCSI1 and iSCSI2) on a separate virtual switch.

For high-availability deployments, in which clients have redundant physical switches, the best practice is to route each iSCSI card to a different physical switch. This will usually involve specifying a different virtual network for each of the iSCSI cards.

Cloning vRPAs:

The best practice is to create each vRPA instance from the OVF. vRPAs may be cloned, but must not be a member of an existing RecoverPoint cluster. Cloning has no effect on the source vRPA and the target vRPA will automatically reset its

configuration when it is booted, to avoid IP collisions. Deployment Manager can then be used to add the clone to the RPA cluster.

iSCSI bandwidth: In VNX, either of two types of iSCSI modules may be available:

1Gb port cards, which allow bandwidth of 1Gb, 2Gb, 4Gb.

10Gb port cards, which allow bandwidth of 10Gb, 20Gb.

Since the vRPA relies on virtual networks, the bandwidth that the user exposes to the vRPA iSCSI vSwitches will determine the performance that the vRPA can reach. The user can configure vSphere hosts with quad port NICs and present them to the vRPAs as single or dual iSCSI networks; or implement VLAN tagging to logically divide the network traffic among multiple vNICs.

vMotion, Storage vMotion, and HA Features: As is the case for physical RPAs, any online or offline porting of vRPA is supported with the exceptions of pause or resume operations, which may lead to temporary disruptions in service (full stop) as there is only one cluster leader per cluster and one preferred RPA per CG. Note: Please refer to the RecoverPoint vRPA Technical Notes for the most current best practices.

8.7 Recommendations for VMware vCenter Site Resource Manager VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager provides advanced capabilities for disaster recovery management, non-disruptive testing, and automated failover. The following performance recommendations have been made in this paper:

Place all VM swap files on specific datastores that do not get replicated. SRM can configure those swap files on a local datastore at the remote site upon failover or test failover.

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Grouping virtual machines under fewer protection groups’ enables faster test and real recoveries, provided those virtual machines have no constraints preventing them from being grouped under similar protection groups.

Enable VMware DRS at recovery site. This will ensure optimal performance and recovery time as VMware DRS will load balance the recovered virtual machines across the hosts.

Manually distribute placeholder virtual machines evenly across recovery hosts if VMware DRS is not enabled. This will help in distributing the load across hosts for all recovery virtual machine operations, which will in turn improve performance and recovery time.

It is important to chart out the dependencies between, and priorities for, virtual machines to be recovered so that only a certain number of required virtual machines can be assigned as high priority. It does impact test and real recovery time. Similarly, suspending virtual machines on the recovery site will also impact recovery time.

It is strongly recommended that VMware Tools be installed in all protected virtual machines in order to accurately acquire their heartbeats and network change notification.

Make sure any internal script or call out prompt does not block recovery indefinitely VNX5800: Local+Remote Replication This solution is validated using for up to 1000 virtual machines. There are multiple ways to achieve this configuration with the building blocks. Error! Reference source not found. Shows how this onfiguration was applied.

Figure 16: Storage Pool layout for 1000 virtual machines using VNX 5800

This VSPEX Private Cloud solution uses the following storage layout to support 1000 VMs:

(377) 600 GB SAS drives are allocated to (8) block-based storage pools o Each pool has 45 SAS drives for the Performance Tier o Each pool has 2 EFD drives for the Extreme Performance Tier

(12) 600 GB SAS drives are configured as hot spares. (4) 200 GB Flash drives are configured for Fast VP (16) 200 GB Flash drives are configured for each storage pool (2 per each storage pool). (1) 200 GB Flash drives are configured as a hot spare. Enable FAST VP to automatically tier data to use differences in performance and capacity.

FAST VP:

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Works at the block storage pool level and automatically adjusts where data is stored based on how access frequency.

Promotes frequently accessed data to higher tiers of storage in 1-GB increments and migrates infrequently accessed data to a lower tier for cost efficiency. This rebalancing of 1 GB data units, or slices, is part of a regularly scheduled maintenance operation.

For block, allocate at least two LUNs to the vSphere cluster from a single storage pool to serve as datastores for the virtual servers.

Each of the (6) CSV datastores is 6TB in size and we have estimated our daily change rate to be 10% so our six journal volumes will each be 600GB.

o Minimum journal size: 10 GB (non-distributed CG) and 40 GB (distributed CG) o Maximum journal size per CG: 10 TB o Maximum journal volumes per CG copy: 128

Note: Each copy of the production data also must have its own journal volume too, so our environment will have a total of (18) 600GB journal volumes to complete the Local+Remote configuration.

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9.0 VMware vCenter Implementation

9.1 Overview This section gives an overview of the vCenter implementation process. At this point the RecoverPoint system must be installed and configured so that vCenter and the required plugins may be installed. The following is a detailed list of components required for this solution:

Deploy the ESXi v5.5 Servers Install vCenter to create a new Datacenter and Cluster Install the Virtual Storage Integration Plug-in Install the RecoverPoint Storage Adapter Plug-In Install the Site Resource Manager Install the SRM Client, VSI, and RecoverPoint SRA Plug-Ins Validate RecoverPoint health with Unisphere GUI RecoverPoint Protection Tab RecoverPoint Recovery Tab RecoverPoint RPA Clusters Tab

9.2 Install the Site Resource Manager Overview of VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is a business continuity and disaster recovery solution that helps you to plan, test, and run the recovery of virtual machines between a protected vCenter Server site and a recovery vCenter Server site. You can configure SRM to work with several third-party disk replication mechanisms by configuring array-based replication. Array-based replication surfaces replicated datastores to protect virtual machine workloads. You can also use host-based replication by configuring SRM to use VMware vSphere Replication to protect virtual machine workloads. You can use SRM to implement different types of recovery from the protected site to the recovery site.

Planned Migration: The orderly evacuation of virtual machines from the protected site to the recovery site. For planned migration to succeed, both sites must be running and fully functioning.

Disaster Recovery: Similar to planned migration except that disaster recovery does not require that both sites be up and running, for example if the protected site goes offline unexpectedly. During a disaster recovery operation, failure of operations on the protected site are reported but otherwise ignored.

SRM coordinates the recovery process with the replication mechanisms, to minimize data loss and system down time.

At the protected site, SRM shuts down virtual machines cleanly, if the protected site is still running.

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SRM powers on the replicated virtual machines at the recovery site according to a recovery plan.

A recovery plan specifies the order in which virtual machines start up on the recovery site. A recovery plan specifies network parameters, such as IP addresses, and can contain user-specified scripts that SRM can run to perform custom recovery actions. SRM lets you test recovery plans. You conduct tests by using a temporary copy of the replicated data in a way that does not disrupt ongoing operations at either site. Array-Based Replication

When deploying this solution you will be using array-based replication with one or more storage arrays at the protected site replicate data to peer arrays at the recovery site. RecoverPoint requires that you use a storage replication adapter (SRA) to integrate SRM with the features of RecoverPoint Continuous Remote Replication (CRR). Note: It is possible to combine vSphere Replication and Array Replication as registered extensions. Selecting both options will install the components that SRM requires to work with vSphere Replication. You may also add/remove either extension by running the installer again in Repair mode. Installation Overview

Spin up a VM with Windows Server 2012 Server for SRM to live on. Install SQL2012 and configure a database for SRM. Install the vCenter Client on the SRM Server Download the SRM, VSI, and SRA installation files to a folder on the SRM Server. A user account with sufficient privileges to install SRM. The fully qualified domain name (FQDN) or IP address of the site’s vCenter Server instance.

The user name and password of the vCenter Server administrator account. A user name and password for the SRM database.

Figure 17: SRM Installation Wizard

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SRM Installation Steps: 1) Enter information about the vCenter Server instance at the site where you are installing SRM

vCenter Server Address vCenter Server Port vCenter Server Username vCenter Server Password

2) Select an authentication method. Credential Based Certificate Based

3) Type the administrator and host configuration information. Local Site Name: A name for this installation of SRM. A suggested name is generated, but

you may change this name as necessary. Note: It cannot be the same name that you use for another

SRM installation with which this one will be paired Administrator E-mail Additional E-mail Local Host: Name or IP address of the local host. This value is obtained by the SRM installer

and will be determined by the number network interfaces installed and the order in which they are detected. If you use certificate-based authentication, the Local Host value must be the same as the SAN value of the supplied certificate. This is usually the FQDM of the SRM Server host.

Listener and API Listener Ports: Use default values

4) Provide the SRM database configuration information. Database Client: Select a database client type from the drop-down menu. Data Source Name: Select an existing 64-bit DSN from the drop-down menu. If a DSN does

not exist, you may create one at this point by running the Windows 64-bit ODBC Administrator tool.

Username: Type a user ID valid for the specified database. Password: Type the password for the specified user ID Connection Count: Type the initial connection pool size. In most cases, it is not necessary to

change this setting. Before changing this setting, consult with your database administrator. Max Connections: Type the maximum number of database connections that can be open

simultaneously. In most cases, it is not necessary to change this setting. Before changing this setting consult with your database administrator.

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9.3 Install the SRM Client, VSI, and RecoverPoint SRA Plug-Ins To install the SRM client plug-in, you use a vSphere Client to connect to the vCenter Server at the protected or recovery site. You download the plug-in from the SRM Server and enable it in the vSphere Client. When you install the SRM Server, the SRM client plug-in becomes available as a download from the vCenter Server instance that the SRM Server installation extends. You can download, install, and enable the SRM client plug-in on any host where a vSphere Client is installed.

Figure 18: VMware vCenter SRM Extension

Steps to Download and Install the VMware SRM Manager extension 1) Start the vSphere Client and connect to vCenter Server at either the protected or recovery site. 2) Select Plugins > Manage Plug-ins. 3) Under Available Plug-ins, locate VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager extension and click

Download and Install. Note: Be sure to check that the vCenter SRM Server service is running on the SRM Server. This service is NOT automatically started after installation and is required for the client install.

Figure 19: VMware vCenter SRM Server Service

Install the EMC Virtual Storage Integrator for RecoverPoint

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Figure 20: EMC Virtual Storage Integrator Installer

Install the EMC Storage Replication Adapter for RecoverPoint

Figure 21: EMC Storage Replication Adapter for RecoverPoint

Once the VMware vCenter SRM, VSI, and RecoverPoint SRA have been loaded the plugin list should be populated as follows:

Figure 22: Installed Plugins for vCenter

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Figure 23: Solutions and Application Extensions

9.4 Validate RecoverPoint health with Unisphere GUI Providing management consistency between VSPEX, RecoverPoint and VNX, RecoverPoint is managed by Unisphere. Same look and feels user interfaces.

Figure 24: RecoverPoint Dashboard for Overall Health

9.5 RecoverPoint Protection Tab The RecoverPoint Protection Tab configures the following options:

Protect Volumes: Add a new consistency group and define its protection plan. Manage Protection: Manage and monitor existing consistency groups and their protection

plans, control transfer, and bookmark a consistent point-in-time across groups and sets of groups.

Manage Group Sets: Periodically bookmark the same point-in-time across sets of consistency groups. View, Add, Modify, and Delete group sets.

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Figure 25: RecoverPoint Protection for External Management

Verify the External Management for each of the Consistency Groups between RDU and ATL.

Figure 26: Replication Sets

Verify the Replication Set status for each of the Consistency Groups between RDU and ATL.

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Figure 27: Status for Manage Protection

Verify the Overall status for each of the Consistency Groups between RDU and ATL.

9.6 RecoverPoint Recovery Tab The RecoverPoint Recovery Tab configures the following options:

Test a Copy: Access any previous point-in-time at a copy, to analyze or clone the copy image.

Fail Over: Permanently migrate all production activities to a copy, or temporarily move production activities to a copy until the production system is repaired.

Recover Production: Use a copy image to restore the production data to any point-in-time. Manage Recovery: Manage and monitor all currently accessed copies undergoing testing,

failover, and/or production recovery.

Figure 28: Recovery Options

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9.7 Validating RecoverPoint RPA Clusters Use the RPA Clusters > General Cluster Info link to graphically display an overview of the current status of the individual components of your RecoverPoint system. 1. The General Context: Shows the topology and component details.

Figure 29: RPA Cluster General Properties

2. The Splitter Context: Shows the splitter status and volumes attached to splitter.

Figure 30: RPA Cluster Splitters

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3. The RPA Context: Shows the RPA status along with their Properties, Status, and Interface.

Figure 31: RPA Cluster Appliance Pairs

4. The vCenter Server Context: Shows the attached vCenter Servers along with the managed VMware vSphere Servers and their VM assignments.

Figure 32: RPA Cluster vCenter Servers

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Figure 33: RecoverPoint Consistency Group Status

The General Cluster Info section contains a Cluster Diagram and a Cluster Details section that allow you to easily monitor and analyze the current state of the RPA cluster. The cluster diagram contains all of the major components of the RecoverPoint system (host, storage, and RPAs) and the connectivity between them and the RPA cluster. An icon is displayed on any system component for which system alerts have been registered.

Figure 34: Display Alert Warnings

Select a row in the replication sets table in the top section to display the associated volume information in the bottom section. (Figure 29) For each volume the following information is displayed; vendor, array, serial number, ID, UID, size and VPLEX group

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Figure 35: Unisphere Storage Provisioning screen

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10.0 Completing the Implementation 10.1 Overview This section covers installation and configuration required to use RecoverPoint to replicate VMware ESXi servers. This section contains the following topics:

Configuring RecoverPoint for VMware Configuring and installing VNX based splitters Creating local and remote copies of the VMware datastores Configuring VMware for RecoverPoint Configuring Site Resource Manager Virtual Storage Integration Plug-in RecoverPoint Storage Adapter Plug-in Multipath policy VMware temp and swap files

10.2 Configuring RecoverPoint Using the RP/SE QuickStart Installation Guide as a reference, The RecoverPoint/SE Installer allows you to select one of the following installation modes: Create a new installation configuration file – The system creates a new installation from the

beginning. Starting with a blank configuration, the user must enter configuration settings for the installation. The system uses these settings to complete the installation.

Provide a valid file name and directory location. By default, the file name and directory location is

C:\Users\ <username>\RecoverPoint\ RPSE_config.properties.

Figure 36: DM Configuration File screen

Create or continue an installation from a saved configuration file – The system loads the

settings from a previously saved configuration file.

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o If using the file to create a new installation from a saved file, and the file was already applied to a previous installation, the system will allow you to use it by changing the configuration parameters.

o If using the file to continue a RecoverPoint/SE installation, after having already installed the settings to a first or second site or both, this operation will allow you to complete the installation of the site(s) and apply the settings. To perform this step, browse and select the file and select the Skip to step Apply Configuration (if a site has already been installed) checkbox.

o Note: When selecting this mode, the system will not allow you to change any site settings, but rather, will allow you to apply the preconfigured settings to the site(s).

Once a file name is entered and you click Next to continue, the system automatically saves any configuration settings you entered in the configuration file.

10.3 Environment settings Define the structure of the RecoverPoint/SE installation and the site settings. Installation Structure Number of sites – The number of sites for this deployment:

o 1 site – Local replication at a single site o 2 sites – Local, Remote, or Local+Remote replication across two sites

Number of RPAs per site – 2-8 RPAs per site (as determined by BCSD in section 5.4 The Business Continuity Solution Designer)

IP type – IPv4 or IPv6 The IP version used to link the RPAs to the WAN interface. o Private – for one site configuration and 2-site configuration over FC o WAN – for 2-site configuration over IP

Remote replication to be done over – The protocol used for replication between sites. o IP – Internet protocol o FC – Fibre Channel

If there is IP connectivity between sites, select Allow communication between the two sites over standard IP for control and time synchronization purposes checkbox to enable extraction of the system logs from a single site and enable a centralized NTP server for both sites. Note: When selecting this option, you must manually zone all site RPAs. For a complete list of zoning requirements see the RecoverPoint Installation Procedure provided by the Procedure Generator. Site Settings (1 or 2 sites) Site name – The name of the site for this deployment. Time zone – The time zone for the site. Management IP type – Determine whether any of the site IP addresses use IPv4, IPv6, or both

IPv4 and IPv6.

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Domain name (optional) – The site domain name. Primary DNS Server (optional) – The IP address of the primary DNS server for the site. Secondary DNS Server (optional) – The IP address of the secondary DNS server for the site. NTP Server 1 (optional) – The IP address of NTP server 1 for the site. NTP Server 2 (optional) – The IP address of NTP server 2 for the site.

Note: It should be noted that it is essential that all of your RPA’s and other equipment be using the same time source. You may define up to (2) NTP servers for the RecoverPoint configuration. If you are installing two sites, you can only define the NTP server on one of the sites. Therefore, once you select a site that will be synchronized with the NTP server, the other RPAs in the configuration will synchronize time with the NTP server settings.

Figure 37: DM Environmental Settings

10.4 Site-1 Name RPA Discovery Define how you want to set the IP addresses of uninstalled RPAs. Two options are provided: I have already set IP addresses for the RPAs

This option is recommended when one or more of the following is true: o You have already set the IP addresses. o You are installing RPAs running releases earlier than 3.5 o Your environment does not include a DHCP server.

I want Deployment Manager to discover the RPA IP addresses

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This option is only relevant when RPAs are running release 3.5 or later and your environment includes a DHCP server. When you select this option, the Discover uninstalled RecoverPoint Appliances (RPAs) section becomes active.

In the Discover uninstalled RecoverPoint Appliances (RPAs) section; when you click Discover, you can choose how Deployment Manager will discover the RPAs and get their currently set IP addresses:

o Run discovery from work station — The installer will try to discover all unattached RPAs running 3.5 or later. The work station must be able to communicate with all RPAs.

o Run discovery from an RPA — The installer will try to discover all unattached RPAs running 3.5 or later. The RPA must be running 3.5 or later and be able to communicate with all RPAs.

o Enter the RPA’s IP and Password. (default username/password = boxmgmt/boxmgmt).

Once you click OK, a Select a discovered RPA link appears beside each RPA field. Click it and select an IP address of a discovered RPA. Once you do this for all RPAs, click Next.

Figure 38: DM RPA Discovery

10.5 IP Addressing for Site-1 and Site-2 Define the site IP configurations and the RPA IP settings. Settings - These IP settings must be entered for site control purposes. Subnet mask Default gateway

Management (LAN) settings Subnet mask

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Default gateway – Used to access the management interface from a remote subnet. Site management IP – A virtual IP address that is used to configure the RPA cluster at a site as a

whole. This IP address is assigned to the RPA that is currently running the active instance of the site management.

RPAs IP settings Management IP address for each new RPA WAN or Private IP address for each new RPA MTU (do not modify unless instructed to do so)

Figure 39: DM IP and Connectivity Settings

Note: The order of IPs assigned to RPAs is significant. If you define an RPA number with an IP address, the physical RPA with this IP address will become the RPA number in the cluster. Also, All RPA’s must be on the same network, per site.

10.6 Apply Configuration Enter RecoverPoint Appliance login credentials and determine which site to install now.

RecoverPoint Appliance Login Credentials The system will prompt you to enter your RecoverPoint Appliance login information. The default username/password is boxmgmt/boxmgmt.

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Figure 40: DM Login Credentials

Apply Configuration Which site do you want to install now? – The system allows two-step installation when deploying RecoverPoint/SE on two sites. If you want to phase the installation by applying the settings to only one of the sites, choose the site to which you want to apply the settings. If you have already installed one of the sites, choose the site you want to install now and select the Other site already installed checkbox.

The following options are available: Site1Name and Site2Name – Applies settings to both sites. To apply at both sites:

o The RPAs at both sites must be physically installed. o Management IP addresses must be assigned. o Networking requirements must be met.

Site1Name – Applies the settings to site 1 only. To complete the installation, you will need to continue the installation at site 2 using the saved configuration file.

Site2Name – Applies settings to site 2 only. To complete the installation, you will need to continue the installation at site 1 using the saved configuration file.

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Figure 41: DM Applying Configuration Settings

10.7 Storage Configuration – VNX login credentials

Enter the login credentials for your VNX storage system at the site:

Unisphere/Navisphere login credentials

Array SP A IP – Enter the IP address of array SP A at the site. Array SP B IP – Enter the IP address of array SP B at the site. EMC Unisphere/Navisphere username – Enter the Unisphere/Navisphere username at the site. EMC Unisphere/Navisphere password – Enter the Unisphere/Navisphere password at the site. Authentication scope – Select the default of Global as the scope of the user account. Click Next to confirm login credentials and continue.

10.8 Storage Configuration – VNX login status

The system now has the necessary information required to validate the VNX settings and attempts to log in to the VNX array and validate the following information: The RecoverPoint/SE Installer can communicate with VNX SP A and SP B. The login credentials are correct for SP A and SP B. SP A and SP B are not already attached to the RecoverPoint/SE cluster. IP settings were applied successfully.

The system communicates and validates the statuses of the RPAs and confirms that all components are OK or that errors are detected. If errors are detected, click the error to display details, and instructions on how to correct the problem. The array name and serial number of the array are also displayed.

Figure 42: VNX Login Credentials

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10.9 Storage Configuration – Zoning

Select how you want to perform zoning.

Automatic – The Installer zones the RPAs and the VNX arrays automatically. See Zoning: Automatic for more details. Note: This option is available with Brocade and Cisco switches only.

Semi-automatic – The Installer creates the necessary zoning scripts, but you must apply them yourself. See Zoning: Semi-automatic for more details. Note: This option is available with Brocade and Cisco switches only.

Manual – The Installer indicates which ports should be zoned together, and you are responsible for actually creating the zones. See Zoning: Manual for more details.

Direct-attach Storage - The Installer verifies that, in this switchless configuration, each RPA is directly connected to SP A and SP B of the VNX array. See Zoning: Direct-attach Storage for more details.

Figure 43: VNX Login Status Screen - SAN Diagnostics.

Note: If you are using directly attached RPA’s to the VNX arrays, then the wizard will automatically skip this screen and continue to Storage Configuration

Zoning: Automatic

Automatic zoning can be performed for Cisco fabric switches and for Brocade (Connectrix B-Series) switches running FOS 6.0 and higher. You must enter switch credentials to allow RecoverPoint/SE to perform automatic zoning. Enter the following details for each fabric: Switch type – Cisco or Brocade only IP address of the fabric switch at the site Username for the fabric switch at the site

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Password for the fabric switch at the site

The Installer automatically creates an RPA-to-storage zone for each RPA at this site, each zone includes: One HBA port of that RPA One port for each VNX storage processor

10.10 Storage Configuration – SAN Diagnostics

The system performs SAN diagnostics for the site, attempting to validate that the current configuration is appropriate for the RPA, and that RecoverPoint/SE can successfully operate in the current SAN environment. The system will confirm that all components are OK and that no errors exist. If errors are detected, you can click the error to display details and instructions on how to correct the problem.

Figure 44: SAN Diagnostics

Note: It is highly recommended to resolve all SAN discovery warning or errors, even though the system allows you to ignore them and continue the installation.

10.11 Storage Configuration – Repository volume

Determine how you want the repository volume to be selected. Automatic - The Installer will automatically create and configure a repository volume. Manual - The Installer lists possible volumes, and you can select the one to be configured as

the repository volume.

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Note: Currently, RecoverPoint Deployment Manager can only create Repository Volumes from RAID Groups so if your desire is to use Storage Pools to provision your Repository Volumes you will need to perform this step manually as seen in the RecoverPoint Deployment Guide.

Figure 45: Repository Volumes

10.12 Storage Configuration – Apply Configuration

Wait for the configuration to be applied. The steps involved are: Configuring VNX array

o Creating internal VNX storage groups o Registering RPA WWNs on VNX array

Configuring RPAs o Creating repository volume o Configuring repository volume

Finishing the installation o Attaching RPAs to cluster o Waiting for RPAs to come up after reboots

Progress bars indicate that the system is applying settings and completing the installation. Once the progress bars stop, the system will confirm that all components are OK, or that errors are detected. If errors are detected, you can click the error to display details and instructions on how to correct the problem.

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Figure 46: Apply Configuration

To proceed to the next step in the wizard, you must resolve all errors. Once errors are resolved, click Retry to reapply settings and revalidate that the RPA installation is successful.

10.13 RecoverPoint Install Summary

The summary screen presents a summary of the site configurations. For a two-site installation, tabs are available for each site, and can be clicked to display the relevant site information. Paths from RPAs – Port, WWN, Controller, Serial number, LUN.

Figure 47: RPA Initiator WWNs

Zoning – The zoning information for Fabric A and Fabric B.

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Table 6: Zoning Information for Fabric-A and Fabric-B

Site - 1 (Source / Raleigh) Site - 2 (Target / Atlanta) Fabric-A (even) Fabric-B

(odd) Fabric-A (even) Fabric-B

(odd)

zone name VSPEX_RPA_VNX5800_a

zone name VSPEX_RPA_VNX5800_b

zone name VSPEX_RPA_VNX5400_a

zone name VSPEX_RPA_VNX5400_b

VSPEX-RPA1-P0 VSPEX-RPA1-P1 VSPEX-RPA3-P0 VSPEX-RPA3-P1




VSPEX-VNX-5800-SPa0 VSPEX-VNX-5800-SPa1 VSPEX-VNX-5400-SPa0 VSPEX-VNX-5400-SPa1

VSPEX-VNX-5800-SPa2 VSPEX-VNX-5800-SPa3 VSPEX-VNX-5400-SPa2 VSPEX-VNX-5400-SPa3

VSPEX-VNX-5800-SPb0 VSPEX-VNX-5800-SPb1 VSPEX-VNX-5400-SPb0 VSPEX-VNX-5400-SPb1

VSPEX-VNX-5800-SPb2 VSPEX-VNX-5800-SPb3 VSPEX-VNX-5400-SPb2 VSPEX-VNX-5400-SPb3

Storage Groups – The RecoverPoint/SE storage group created.

Figure 48: VNX Storage Group

Note: A RecoverPoint storage group contains all the VNX LUNs that RecoverPoint/SE will replicate. Do not change the name of the storage group, or RecoverPoint/SE may fail to function properly. Installation complete at one or two sites

Once you have completed the installation of the RecoverPoint/SE clusters (at all sites), you can start managing the RecoverPoint/SE system using the RecoverPoint/SE Management Application. To do so, click the site management IP address displayed.

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The wizard closes and the RecoverPoint Management Application opens. Once open, the Getting Started Wizard appears. For further information, refer to the “Getting Started Wizard” section of the EMC RecoverPoint Administrator’s Guide.

Installation complete at two sites, but only applied at one site

If you have completed installation of two sites, but only applied the configuration to one of them, you must complete the following installation steps:

1. Have the saved configuration file available at the other site. 2. Launch the Deployment Manager at the other site. 3. On the login screen, select Other operations and enter your RecoverPoint login credentials

(CLI).

Note: Default CLI username and password = admin.

4. From the Deployment Manager Wizard, select option RecoverPoint/SE Installer Wizard. 5. Select the I have fulfilled the conditions for installing my environment checkbox, click Next. 6. On the Configuration file screen:

Select Create or continue an installation from a saved configuration file and open the file.

Select the Skip to step Apply Configuration (if a site has already been installed) checkbox.

Note: The system will now only allow you to apply the preconfigured settings to the site(s).

7. On the Apply Configuration screen: Enter RecoverPoint Appliance login credentials. Determine which site to install now. Select the Other site already installed checkbox.

The applied settings will be loaded and allow you to complete the installation.

10.14 Creating local and remote copies of the VMware datastores Figure 38 shows an example of the RecoverPoint volumes required to replicate datastores both Local and Remote. The entire VMware datastore is replicated along with the VM's, the application data, and boot volumes. Upon failover, the virtual machines are available at a remote copy in the exact state that they were on the production copy.

Figure 49: Creating Local and Remote Copies of the VMware Datastores

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10.15 Configuring VMware for RecoverPoint Configure the EMC VSI for use with VMware SRM and RecoverPoint.

Figure 50: VSI Feature Manager

Figure 51: VSI RecoverPoint Management

10.16 Configure SRM Servers at the Protected and Recovery Sites 1) Connect the Sites: set up two pairing between sites.

Configure the Protected and Recovery Sites

Figure 52: SRM Protected Sites

Before you can use SRM, you must connect the protected and recovery sites. The sites must authenticate with each other. This is known as site pairing.

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When you enter the address of the vCenter Server instance on the recovery site, take a note of the address format that you use. You must use the same address format that you use to connect the SRM sites for later configuration operations. You must enter exactly the same vCenter Server address format here that you entered when installing the SRM Server at the recovery site. If you used an IP address when installing the SRM Server at the recovery site, use an IP address to pair the SRM sites. If you entered a hostname when installing the SRM Server, use the same hostname to pair the SRM sites.

If you selected the option to install vSphere Replication, you must use the same vCenter Server address format in the vSphere Replication configuration as you use here. If you use an IP address to pair the SRM sites, you must use an IP address in the vSphere Replication configuration. If you use a hostname to pair the SRM sites, you must use a hostname in the vSphere Replication configuration.

Prerequisites Verify that you installed SRM Server instances at the protected and recovery sites. Verify that you installed the SRM client plug-in in the vSphere Client. Configure and start the SRM database service before you install the SRM Server. Download the SRM installation file to a folder on the machine on which to install SRM. SRM requires a DSN for ODBC system before you run the SRM installer. A user account with sufficient privileges to install SRM. The fully qualified domain name (FQDN) or IP address of the site’s vCenter Server The user name and password of the vCenter Server administrator account. A user name and password for the SRM database.

Steps to Configure SRM

1) In the vSphere Client, connect to the SRM Server on the protected site. 2) Select Sites in the left pane, then click Configure Connection on the Getting Started tab. 3) On the Remote Site Information page, type the IP address or hostname of the vCenter Server

instance at the recovery site and the port to which to connect and click Next. Port 80 is used for the initial connection to the remote site. After the initial HTTP connection is made, the two sites establish an SSL connection for subsequent connections.

Figure 53: vCenter Address and Port

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4) On the vCenter Server Authentication page, provide the vCenter administrator user name

and password for the recovery site and click Next. 5) You must enter exactly the same information here that you entered when installing the SRM

Server at the recovery site.

Figure 54: vCenter Credentials

6) Setup Inventory Mappings: set up inventory mappings between the sites. Set up mappings

for both sites for two-way replication. Resource Mappings

Figure 55: Resource Mappings

Folder Mappings

Figure 56: Folder Mappings

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Network Mappings

Figure 57: Network Mappings

7) Assign Placeholder Datastores: specify a datastore to use for placeholder VMs. Set a placeholder datastore at each site in order to perform reprotect and failback.

Placeholder Datastores

Figure 58: Placeholder Datastores

Unless you intend to configure these mappings individually for each member of the group, configure inventory mappings before you create protection groups. You can include virtual machine templates in a protection group, and like protected virtual machines, templates appear as placeholders at the recovery site. If you convert a protected template to a virtual machine or convert a protected virtual machine to a template, the converted object loses its protection and must be reconfigured. Protection groups are created from one or more datastores groups. These datastore groups are established automatically by SRM. When a group is selected, the datastores in the group are associated with a protection group. Be aware that datastore groups are not fixed, and often change over time in response to things such as reconfiguration of consistency groups. In such a case, SRM automatically recalculates the datastore groups. When a protection group is created, the datastores selected in the wizard are assigned to a protection group. The protection group does not change unless it is modified by a user.

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Protection groups are defined by datastores, and the datastores that make up a protection group are determined by a user. When a user creates a protection group, the set of datastores that can be assigned to that group are restricted. SRM automatically forces users to choose datastores that make up complete protection groups. As changes in the inventory occur, datastore groups are automatically recalculated.

10.17 Configure Array Managers After you pair the protected site and recovery site, configure their respective array managers so that SRM can discover replicated devices, compute datastore groups, and initiate storage operations.

Figure 59: Array Managers

You typically configure array managers only once, after you connect the sites. You do not need to reconfigure them unless array manager connection information or credentials change, or you want to use a different set of arrays. Steps to Add Array Managers

Select Array Managers in the SRM interface, and select the site on which you want to configure array managers.

Click the Summary tab and click Add Array Manager. Type a name for the array in the Display Name text box. Select the array manager type that you want SRM to use from the SRA Type drop-down

menu. If no manager type appears, rescan for SRAs. Repeat these steps for the recovery site. Enable the Array Pairs

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Figure 60: Array Pairs

Figure 61: Local and Remote Device Pairings

10.18 Understanding Protection Groups Protection groups provide coverage for all virtual machines in the group. To support a protection group, connect the protected site and recovery site and then configure the array managers.

Figure 62: Protection Groups

10.19 Create Array-Based Protection Groups You create array-based protection groups to enable the protection of virtual machines in datastore groups that you configure to use array-based replication. SRM discovered the datastore groups when you configured the array managers. SRM replicates to the recovery site each datastore group that you select. After you create a protection group, SRM creates placeholder virtual machines and applies inventory mappings for each virtual machine in the group. If SRM cannot map a virtual machine to a folder, network, and resource pool on the recovery site, SRM sets the virtual machine in the Mapping Missing status, and does not create a placeholder for it.

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You can organize protections groups in folders. Different views in the Recovery interface display the names of the recovery groups, but they do not display the folder names. If you have two protection groups with the same name in different folders, it might be difficult to tell them apart in some views in the Recovery interface. Consequently, ensure that protection names are unique across all folders. In environments in which not all users have view privileges for all folders, to be sure of the uniqueness of protection group names do not place protection groups in folders. When you create protection groups, wait to ensure that the operations finish as expected. Make sure that SRM creates the protection group and that the protection of the virtual machines in the group is successful. Steps to Configure Protection Groups

Click Protection Groups, and click Create Protection Group. Select a Protected Site and an Array Pair

Figure 63: Protected Site

Select a datastore group

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Figure 64: Datastore groups

Note: When you select a datastore group, the virtual machines in that datastore group appear in the Virtual Machines on the Selected Datastore Group pane, and are marked for inclusion in the protection group after you create the protection group.

10.20 Create a Recovery Plan You create a recovery plan to establish how SRM recovers virtual machines. During tests, isolate the virtual machines that SRM recovers. If SRM brings duplicate machines on line and they begin to interact with unprotected virtual machines in your production network, errors can occur.

Figure 65: Recovery Plans

Procedure

Click Recovery Plans, click the Summary tab, and click Create Recovery Plan. Select the recovery site.

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Figure 66: Recovery Site

Select one or more Protection Groups.

Figure 67: Protection Groups

Select a recovery site network to which recovered VMs connect during recovery plan tests.

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Figure 68: Test Networks

Note: You can isolate virtual machine SRM restorations during test recoveries by selecting Auto, which is an isolated network, or by selecting a manually created network that is not connected to other networks. Enter a name for the Recovery Plan.

Figure 69: Recovery Plan Name and Description

Review the summary information and click Finish to create the recovery plan.

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11.0 Recovery Plans 11.1 Overview of Recovery Pans A recovery plan is like an automated run book. It controls every step of the recovery process, including the order in which SRM powers on and powers off virtual machines, the network addresses that recovered virtual machines use, and so on. Recovery plans are flexible and customizable. A recovery plan includes one or more protection groups. You can include a protection group in more than one recovery plan. For example, you can create one recovery plan to handle a planned migration of services from the protected site to the recovery site, and another plan to handle an unplanned event such as a power failure or natural disaster. Having these different recovery plans allows you to decide how to perform recovery.

Figure 70: Recovery Plan Options

Testing a recovery plan runs the plan without affecting services at the protected or recovery sites, apart from powering off any virtual machines on the recovery site if you configure the recovery plan to do so. You can perform planned migrations from the protected site to the recovery site or disaster recoveries by running a recovery plan. You can run only one recovery plan at a time to recover a particular protection group. If you simultaneously test or run multiple recovery plans that specify the same protection group, only one recovery plan can fail over the protection group.

11.2 Testing a Recovery Plan When you test a recovery plan, SRM runs the recovery plan on a test network and a temporary snapshot of replicated data at the recovery site. SRM does not disrupt operations at the protected site. Testing a recovery plan runs all the steps in the plan with the exception of powering down virtual machines at the protected site and forcing devices at the recovery site to assume mastership of replicated data. If the plan requires the suspension of local virtual machines at the recovery site, SRM suspends those virtual machines during the test. Running a test of a recovery plan makes no other changes to the production environment at either site.

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Figure 71: Recovery Steps

Steps for Performing a Test Copy

Click the desired Recovery Plan in the left pane and select the Test button.

Figure 72: Starting a Test Copy

Make acknowledgement of running this plan to recover VM’s at a remote site.

Figure 73: Test Copy Confirmation

Select the Start button to begin the Test Copy.

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Figure 74: Test Copy Start

Monitor progress until completed.

Figure 75: Test Copy Progress

Once completed; the status will update and you may run the clean-up function.

Figure 76: Test Copy Completion

Note: Selecting this option ensures that the recovery site has the latest copy of protected virtual machines, but the synchronization might take more time. Note: SRM initiates recovery steps in the prescribed order, with one exception. It does not wait for the Prepare Storage step to finish for all protection groups before continuing to the next steps.

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11.3 Clean Up After Testing a Recovery Plan After you test a recovery plan, you can return the protected virtual machines to their initial state and reset the recovery plan to the Ready state by running a cleanup operation. SRM performs several cleanup operations after a test.

Powers off the recovered virtual machines. Replaces recovered virtual machines with placeholders, preserving their identity and

configs. Cleans up replicated storage snapshots that the recovered virtual machines used during the

test.

Steps to Perform a Clean Up Click Recovery Plans in the left pane, select the recovery plan that you tested, and click

Cleanup.

Figure 77: Clean-Up Session

Review the cleanup information and click Start.

Figure 78: Starting a Clean-Up Session

Note: The Force Cleanup option forces the removal of virtual machines, ignoring any errors, and returns the plan to the Ready state. If necessary, run cleanup several times with the Force Cleanup option, until the cleanup succeeds.

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11.4 Run a Recovery Plan Use recovery plans to recover a site. You can use recovery plans to complete tasks that include testing recovery and cleaning up after a test. You can use them to complete an actual recovery caused by planned migration or as part of disaster recovery, and to force recovery in the event of a problem with the protected storage array. Forced recovery is for use in cases where storage arrays fail at the protected site and, as a result, protected virtual machines are unmanageable and cannot be shut down, powered off, or unregistered. In such a case, the system state cannot be changed for extended periods. To resolve this situation, you can force failover. Forcing failover does not complete the process of shutting down the virtual machines at the protected site. As a result, a split-brain scenario occurs, but the recovery might complete more quickly. Running forced recovery with array-based replication can affect the mirroring between the protected and the recovery storage arrays. After you run forced recovery, you must check that mirroring is set up correctly between the protected array and the recovery array before you can perform further replication operations. If mirroring is not set up correctly, you must repair the mirroring by using the storage array software. When you enable forced recovery, any outstanding changes on the protection site are not replicated to the recovery site before the failover sequence begins. Replication of the changes occurs according to the recovery point objective (RPO) period of the storage array. If a new virtual machine or template is added on the protection site and failover is initiated before the storage RPO period has elapsed, the new virtual machine or template does not appear on the replicated datastore and is lost. To avoid losing the new virtual machine or template, wait until the end of the RPO period before running the recovery plan with forced recovery. After the forced recovery completes and you have verified the mirroring of the storage arrays, you can resolve the issue that necessitated the forced recovery. After you resolve the underlying issue, run planned migration on the recovery plan again, resolve any problems that occur, and rerun the plan until it finishes successfully. Running the recovery plan again does not affect the recovered virtual machines at the recovery site. To use forced recovery, you must first enable this function. You enable forced recovery by enabling the recovery.forceRecovery setting in the Advanced Settings section of Site properties as shown below.

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Figure 79: Advanced Settings

Steps to Perform a Recovery Plan Click Recovery Plans in the left pane, select the recovery plan to run, and click Recovery. Select the check box to verify that you understand that running the recovery plan will modify your infrastructure configuration.

Select the recovery type.

Figure 80: Recovery Types

Note: Use a Planned Migration if the system is functioning as expected, but you want to migrate machines to the recovery site. This option synchronizes data between sites, which takes longer, but which ensures that the latest information is replicated. The recovery is not completed if errors occur.

Acknowledge that you want to run Forced Recovery mode.

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Figure 81: Forced Recovery

Once the Recovery Plan completes you are now ready to Reprotect.

Figure 82: Completed Recovery Plan

11.5 Reprotect Virtual Machines Reprotect results in the reconfiguration of SRM protection groups and recovery plans to work in the opposite direction. With reprotect, you can recover virtual machines back to the original site after a recovery. Steps to Reprotect Virtual Machines

Click Recovery Plans in the left pane, select a recovery plan, and click Reprotect. Click the Recovery Steps tab to monitor the progress of the reprotect operation.

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Figure 83: Re-Protecting the Recovered Site

Certain steps do not apply to all virtual machines. For example, virtual machines that you configured for array-based replication appear under Configure VR Replication, even though this step does not perform any actions on them. These virtual machines are marked Not Applicable when the step runs. SRM reverses the recovery site and protected sites. SRM creates placeholder copies of virtual machines from the new protected site at the new recovery site

11.6 Protecting Against Local Data Loss and a Local Site Failure Login to Unisphere for RecoverPoint and navigate to the Protection Tab. There you will go to Manage Protection validate each consistency group status to be active and in good health.

Figure 84: Consistency Groups

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Next validate the Replication Set for each consistency group.

Figure 85: Replication Sets

Select a Local copy of your Data and use the Journal tab to validate bookmarks and snaps.

Figure 86: CDP Copy with Journal Volumes

Select a Local copy of your Data and use the Test Copy button to start the operation.

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Figure 87: Starting a Test Copy on a CDP Volume

Select an Image from the Image list and start the Test Copy Process.

Figure 88: Selecting a Point-In-Time image for Testing

Mount the CDP Copy. At this point the bookmark image that you have selected has been enabled. If you have a host which has access to the CDP copy, you can mount the file system and validate it.

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Figure 89: Completing the Test Copy

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12.0 Application Consistency using KVSS Writers 12.1 Create and Mark an Application-Consistent Point-In-Time The RecoverPoint KVSS utility is a command-line utility that enables applying bookmarks to Windows 2003 and 2008-based applications that support Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). Microsoft Exchange and SQL are examples of Windows applications that support Volume Shadow Copy Service. A single bookmark can be used to bookmark VSS-aware applications in many consistency groups. VSS guarantees that the applications are in a consistent state at the point-in-time when each bookmark is applied to an image. As a result, recovery using an image with a KVSS bookmark is faster than recovering from normal RecoverPoint images. KVSS bookmarks are created using the kvss.exe bookmark command in Windows 32-bit environments, and kvssx64.exe bookmark command in Windows 64-bit environments.

12.2 Installing KVSS The KUtils package is must be installed to use the KVSS components. To complete the installation of KVSS:

1. Go to the directory that contains the KVSS installation. (../SAKutils/KVSS/)

2. In the KVSS directory, run the command: “kvss.exe install”

Notes:

This command installs the KVSS hardware provider for this host. All bookmarks created by KVSS are automatically marked as Application-Consistent. The working folder for running KVSS commands:

%SystemDriver%/EMCRecoverPointVSSProvider

12.3 How to use KVSS to create and apply bookmarks: Parameter values should be surrounded by quotation marks Use the “vssadmin list writers” command to obtain a list of registered writers Use the “kvss.exe list” command to display the components found with “vssadmin list

writers” You can run the “kvss.exe set_credentials” command to define the ip, user and password. Multiple writers and groups can be entered simultaneously if they are separated by a space.

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The syntax is as follows: “kvss.exe bookmark”

bookmark=<bookmark_name> writers=<writer_name> <writer_name> [groups=<group_name><group_name>] [consolidation_policy=never|survive_daily|survive_weekly|survive_monthy|always] [type=[FULL|COPY]][ip=<RecoverPoint_cluster_management_ip_address>] [user=<RecoverPoint_username>] [password=<RecoverPoint password>]

Command Syntax Definitions:

writer = a VSS-aware host application group = RecoverPoint consistency group bookmark = name by which you can identify the applied bookmark consolidation_policy = consolidation policy to set for this snapshot. Valid values are:

o never; Snapshot is never consolidated. o survive_daily; Snapshot remains after daily consolidations, but is consolidated in

weekly, monthly, and manual consolidations. o survive_weekly; Snapshot remains after daily and weekly consolidations, but is

consolidated in monthly and manual consolidations. o survive_monthly; Snapshot remains after daily, weekly, and monthly consolidations,

but is consolidated in manual consolidations. o always; Snapshot is consolidated in every consolidation process, whether manual or

automatic. type = The shadow copy type: either FULL or COPY. (The default is COPY) ip = RPA cluster management IP user = RecoverPoint username password = RecoverPoint password

You can use the “kvss.exe set_credentials” command to define the IP address, user, and password one time per Windows user, instead of entering these values each time you create a bookmark.

To create a bookmark for a Microsoft Exchange application for the first time:

kvss.exe set_credentials ip=”10.10.0.145” user=”admin” password=”admin”

kvss.exe bookmark

writers="Microsoft Exchange Writer" groups="exchange\comp1" “exchange\comp2” bookmark="exchange hourly snapshot" consolidation_policy=”survive_daily”

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To create a bookmark every subsequent time for a Microsoft Exchange application after defining the ip, user, and password through the kvss.exe set_credentials command:

kvss.exe bookmark writers="Microsoft Exchange Writer" groups="exchange\comp1" “exchange\comp2” bookmark="exchange hourly snapshot" consolidation_policy=”survive_daily”

12.4 Benefits for using the VSS Writers: SQL 2012 Writer supports:

o Full database backup and restore including full-text catalogs o Differential backup and restore o Restore with move o Database rename o Copy-only backup o Auto-recovery of database snapshot

Exchange 2013 Writer supports:

o The backup program (or agent) runs a scheduled job. o The VSS requester in the backup and restore application sends a command to VSS to

take a shadow copy of the selected Exchange 2013 databases. o VSS communicates with the Exchange writer to prepare for a snapshot backup.

Exchange 2013 prohibits administrative actions against the databases, checks volume dependencies, and suspends all write operations to selected instance of the database and transaction log files while allowing read-only access.

o VSS communicates with the appropriate storage provider to create a shadow copy of the storage volume that contains the Exchange 2013 databases.

o VSS releases Exchange 2013 to resume ordinary operations. o The VSS requester verifies the physical consistency of the backup set prior to

signaling that the backup was successful. Exchange 2013 truncates the transaction logs (if the database is part of a DAG, log truncation is replicated among all the copies) and records the time of the last backup for the database.

SharePoint 2013 Writer supports: o The backup program (or agent) runs a scheduled job. o The VSS requestor in the backup/restore application sends a command to the VSS to

take a shadow copy of the selected SharePoint Foundation storage groups. o The VSS communicates with the SPF-VSS Writer to prepare for a snapshot backup.

SharePoint Foundation prohibits administrative actions against the storage group, checks volume dependencies, and suspends all write operations to database and transaction log files while allowing read-only access.

o The VSS communicates with the appropriate storage provider to create a shadow copy of the storage volume that contains the SharePoint Foundation storage group.

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o The VSS releases SharePoint Foundation to resume ordinary operations. o The VSS requestor verifies the integrity of the backup set prior to signaling that the

backup succeeded. SharePoint Foundation records the time of the last backup for the database.

12.5 EMC AppSync for Protection Management: EMC AppSync is advanced protection management software that offers a better way to manage the protection and replication for critical applications and databases. After defining service plans (i.e. Gold, Silver, Bronze), application owners can protect and recover their own data quickly using EMC VNX replication technologies such as VNX Snapshots and continuous data replication from EMC RecoverPoint. EMC AppSync also provides an application protection monitoring and reporting service that generates alerts if SLAs are not being met and if a replication job fails. AppSync comes with pre-defined policies to meet common objectives set for tiered standards or classifications. For example, for the highest level of protection (zero data loss), you can assign a gold protection plan which would include synchronous replication with EMC RecoverPoint SE. If the application has a 24-hour recovery time objective, you could assign a silver plan to meet that SLA objective that applies the snap technology of VNX snapshots. Tiered service plans:

Gold: Creates restore points locally and remotely Silver: Creates restore points remotely Bronze: Creates restore points locally Built-in service plan alerting

Automated Protection for:

Support for SQL Server 2008 and 2012 Support for Windows Server 2008 and 2012 Support for Exchange 2010 and 2013 Support for Native VMware datastores Support for RecoverPoint Support for VNX Storage

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13.0 Summary Despite the many challenges IT managers face delivering continuous availability for mission-critical applications, the VSPEX with RecoverPoint solution described in this design and implementation guide will provide the infrastructure to meet the needs of the most demanding user availability requirements. All the parts of the solution have been selected based on proven performance in production environments worldwide. Here are some data points reinforcing the selection of the solution technologies:

VSPEX is designed for flexibility and validated to ensure interoperability and fast deployment. VSPEX enables you to choose the technology in your infrastructure solution. Choose the network, server, and hypervisor that your environment requires to go along with EMC’s industry-leading storage and backup. VSPEX offers choice at every layer of the infrastructure, supporting your virtual environment.

VMware is far and away the most pervasively deployed Hypervisor, with the largest virtualized environments in corporate and cloud provider networks running on vSphere. VMware will provide the stable high performance infrastructure required for hosting mission-critical applications.

EMC VNX Series is high-performing unified storage with unsurpassed simplicity and efficiency, optimized for virtual applications. With the VNX Series, you’ll achieve new levels of performance, protection, compliance, and ease of management. Leverage a single platform for file and block data services. Centralized management makes administration simple Leverage a single platform for file and block data services. Centralized management makes administration simple.

Finally, to ensure consistency of solution management, EMC Unisphere provides a common user interface for managing this solution. In choosing the VSPEX with RecoverPoint solution, you are assured a world class infrastructure backed by EMC, with best in class support and services backing up the solution.

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Appendix-A -- References EMC documentation The following documents, available on EMC Online Support provide additional and relevant information. If you do not have access to a document, contact your EMC representative.

EMC VSPEX Private Cloud: VMware vSphere 5.5 for up to 100 Virtual Machines Simple Support Matrix EMC RecoverPoint 4.0 RecoverPoint 4.0 Release Notes RecoverPoint vRPA Technical Notes RecoverPoint Installation and Deployment Guide RecoverPoint Deploying with VNX Arrays and Splitter Technical Notes RecoverPoint Adapter for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Release Notes RecoverPoint Provisioning and Sizing Technical Notes RecoverPoint 4.0 Administrator's Guide RecoverPoint/SE Upgrade Guide RecoverPoint 4.0 Security Configuration Guide RecoverPoint 4.0 Rest API Programming and Reference Guide RecoverPoint Replicating VMware Technical Notes RecoverPoint Detecting Bottlenecks Technical Note RecoverPoint Glossary of Terms RecoverPoint Post Deployment Form

Other documentation The following documents, located on the EMC website, provide additional and relevant information:

Reference RecoverPoint Replicating Microsoft SQL Server Technical Technical Notes RecoverPoint Replicating Microsoft Exchange Server Technical Note Technical Notes Replicating Oracle with EMC RecoverPoint Technical Note Technical Notes RecoverPoint/Cluster Enabler Plug-in Release Note

Appendix-B – Tech Refresh for RecoverPoint Hardware & Software RecoverPoint Hardware Replacement Starting in RecoverPoint 4.0, maintenance operations, such as RPA replacement, are performed on one cluster at a time. To perform an RPA replacement on a cluster, you must log into that cluster using the RPA Replacement Wizard.

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Prerequisites Before you begin using the RPA Replacement Wizard, ensure the following conditions are met:

You know at least one cluster management or RPA IP address. You have valid RecoverPoint login credentials. The new RPA has a RecoverPoint software ISO image that is the same release as that

running on the other RPAs in the cluster. Configuration file The RPA Replacement Wizard allows you to select one of two modes (the "Configuration file screen" illustration):

Create a new RPA replacement configuration file. Continue from a saved RPA replacement configuration file.

RPA replacement prerequisites Before continuing, ensure the following conditions are met on your cluster (the "RPA replacement prerequisites screen" illustration). If any of the conditions are not fulfilled, it is recommended to close the wizard, fulfill the conditions, and then run the wizard again:

Record all connectivity for the LAN, WAN, and SAN of the RPA being replaced, then disconnect the cables from the RPA.

Disconnect the power cables from the RPA being replaced and remove it from the rack. Rack the new RPA; connect the network, FC, and power cables, and power on the RPA. Verify that the RPA image corresponds to the release running on the RPA cluster. Log in to the new RPA; enter the temporary IP address, subnet mask, and gateway of the

replaced RPA, then log out. Storage configuration To configure the storage, you must select whether to spoof the HBA WWN settings of the RPA being replaced (recommended), as shown in the "Storage configuration screen" illustration, or

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use the HBA WWNs of the new RPA. If you are using the HBA WWNs of the new RPA, be sure to continue with Zoning and LUN masking.

Zoning and LUN masking If you decide to use the HBA WWN settings of the new RPA, the wizard displays a table of the new and existing RPA numbers, port numbers, port WWNs, and node WWNs. Select the Show only new RPA HBA WWN settings checkbox to hide the existing RPA information from the table. Use this information to manually zone and mask LUNs for the new RPA you are adding to the cluster, to be consistent with your existing zoning and LUN masking. Note: When replacing RPAs, automatic and semi-automatic zoning options are not available. SAN diagnostics Once the zoning and masking have been completed the system performs SAN diagnostics for the cluster, attempting to validate that the current configuration is appropriate for the RPA and that RecoverPoint can successfully operate in the current SAN environment.

The system will confirm that all components are OK and that no errors exist. If errors are detected, you can click the error to display details and instructions on how to correct the problem.

Summary Once you have completed the replacement of the RPA in the RPA cluster, you can continue using Unisphere for RecoverPoint.

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Appendix-C –RecoverPoint Limitations

RecoverPoint Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) 2.X can be enabled for both CRR and CLR consistency groups; however, VMware SRM only manages the replication between the production storage and the remote site, not between production and the local site. In other words, the local copy of a CLR configuration will not interfere with SRA operation, but only replication from production to the remote site will be managed by SRM.

RecoverPoint SRA 2.X does not support replicating RDM/V.

The following Table lists the TCP ports that must be open for intra-site communication between RPAs and servers that have RecoverPoint Storage Replication Adapters (SRAs) installed on them. Verify communication by running the RecoverPoint GUI from each vCenter machine that has RecoverPoint SRA installed on it.

RecoverPoint SRA Open Machine ports(TCP)

2.0 7115

2.2 7115

The RecoverPoint SRA supports array-based and intelligent fabric-based splitters, but not host-based splitters. For the most up-to-date list of supported splitters, refer to the EMC Support Matrix.

ESXi Servers and RPAs must be zoned to the same storage ports at each site.

VMware SRM 5.5 enforces a timeout of 300 seconds (5 minutes) for all RecoverPoint Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) operations. If SRA does not complete an operation within this time limit, the SRM will terminate the operation, possibly causing the environment to be in undesired state. For information on how to change the timeout value, refer to the relevant VMware SRM documentation.

While running, the vRPA’s will ensure that there are enough system resources to maintain resource reservations thus preventing the vRPA’s from disconnecting from RecoverPoint cluster and causing an outage.

The vRPA OVF package can be deployed only from the vCenter management, not via vSphere management. This is a VMware limitation for vApp functionality, which is used by the OVF script.

The vRPA requires a VNX array with dual iSCSI adapters (1 per SP). Both the 1GB or 10GB iSCSI adapters are supported.

Sharing vRPA iSCSI interfaces (iSCSI1 and iSCSI2) with the vRPA regular networks (LAN and WAN) will result in performance degradation and unexpected behavior of the vRPA.

Any pause or resume tasks (or hibernation-like functionality) of a running vRPA virtual machine is not supported and will lead to corruption or failure.

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Collecting vSphere logs from a running vRPA (for instance, using vSphere File > Export > Export System Logs command) may cause inconsistencies in the datastore or other unexpected behavior.

Do not use Mirrorview-enabled ports for vRPA (iSCSI), because the RecoverPoint splitter is not supporting Mirrorview ports, but instead supports SC (San Copy) ports.

Distributed consistency groups are not supported when using vRPA. It should be noted that proper planning should take place to eliminate the risks of a single CG being overcome by the maximum incoming write rates per a single vRPA.

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