This isn't 100% NetApp related, more like 60%, but I think it's still a relevant topic of discussion that others may eventually benefit from too.
I've been tasked with setting up DR for a set of VMware VMs at our primary data center by replicating them via SnapMirror to our secondary data center. Normally I'd just use VMware SRM with the NetApp SRA, set up Array Based Replication within SRM, and be done with it. Let SRM and the SRA take care of test, failover, reprotect, etc.
However, the sticking point is that a lot of the protected VMs use in-guest NFS mounts for things like database volumes or application binaries and SRM doesn't know what to do with those SnapMirror pair volumes because they're not VMware datastores.
My initial thought was to use some PowerShell with the NetApp PowerShell Toolkit in the SRM Recovery Plan for each individual VM pre-boot to connect to the SnapMirror destination filer, break the SnapMirror(s) that the VM uses, mount the volume(s), set export policies, etc. Then figure out how to correctly do resync and reprotect without blowing things up.
I got as far as the first part in PowerShell (connect to the destination filer, break the mirror) and thought to myself that this was stupid.. I'm re-inventing the wheel. Surely someone else out there must have done this before and there is a pre-existing solution? I spoke with a NetApp tech support engineer that I happened to have a case open with already regarding the NetApp SRA and he was able to come up with a suggestion from another engineer: Call WFA from SRM in each VMs recovery plan to break the SnapMirror for the volumes required for the VM to work, then also use WFA in the cleanup and reprotect plan to do that work.
Has anyone else done something like this? I have a feeling that I'm not breaking new ground with this task. Implementing it wrong has pretty severe implications, though, so I'm not eager to mess it up.
Ian Ehrenwald Senior Infrastructure Engineer Hachette Book Group, Inc. 1.617.263.1948 / ian.ehrenwald@hbgusa.com
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