If you’ve met the prerequisites described in part one of this series, deploying the virtual RecoverPoint appliances in your VMware environment should be a straightforward task. Download the latest OVF of the vRPA from the EMC support website and deploy it using the vCenter management console.
Replication
12 posts
It has been a while since I’ve written anything about RecoverPoint since my original post on RecoverPoint 4.0 several years ago. To my delight I was recently put on a couple of projects to deploy new virtual RecoverPoint clusters for two customers. Several things had changed since the first appearance of the virtual RecoverPoint Aplliance (RPA), so why not write a small series on the deployment of these appliances? Gotcha’s included!
The last couple of months I’ve been busy consolidating a couple of European data centers to one location in The Netherlands. Technically this meant we had to migrate a large number of virtual machines with as little downtime as possible across WAN links with varying speeds (30Mbit up to 500Mbit). There are a number of methods to go about this, but we chose to use the vSphere Replication infrastructure which is included in vSphere 5.x for free. Unfortunately there are a couple of downsides in the management interface which become a pain if you have to manage several hundred replications…
Recently I ran into an environment with a couple of VNX5700 systems that were attached to the front-end SAN switches with only two ports per storage processor. The customer was complaining: performance was OK most of the time but at some times during the day the performance was noticeably lower. Analysis revealed that the back-end was coping well with the workload (30-50% load on the disks and storage processors). The front-end ports were a bit (over)loaded and spewing QFULL errors. Time to cable in some extra ports and to rebalance the existing hosts over the new storage paths!
Day 2 of EMC World 2013 started off with a general session from the CEO of EMC, Joe Tucci. He talked about the software defined datacenter, the shift to even more users which are also mobile, and the ingress of large amounts of data which is influencing storage designs. 