Thursday, June 10, 2010

VMware SRM and Data Center Migration

Looking back a few months ago I posted about our Primary Data Center (PDC) migration project, and how we planned to migrate our fairly large VMware environment between datacenters. My initial thought was to extend our SAN's across the 10GbE Metro net (MAN) we have in place and do VMotions and SVmotions to the new hardware in the PDC. While this did seem like a good idea to me in the beginning the powers that be chose to use VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM).

Let me just state now that SRM has worked great. The ease of use to SVMotion VM's to new "staging area" LUNs and then replicate (HDS HUR and NetApp Snapmirror) those to the PDC was so simple. Then the SRM migrations have been simple as well. The testplan have shown to be a great way to verify everything will work before the actual maintenance window.

Let me just say that I was wrong in thinking the SRM migrations would never work for our needs, but it does. Just another piece of VMware that just works and is very clean in its implementation.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Brocade 7500 SAN extension

I've been working on setting up SAN extension between 2 of my DataCenters in OKC. To extend the fabrics across the 10Gb/s link I am using the Brocade 7500 with FCIP license.

My initial configuration thought was to keep the 4 switches (2x48K's and 2x7500's) that I have in the mix as separate un-merged (using EX and VEX ports) fabrics. Well that won't work as you can't have EX ports on Edge fabrics and on the Backbone (the FCIP link). Below are the commands to setup the configuration I used.

 

(creating FCIP tunnel VEX-to-VE port link)
lfcrouter1# portcfgvexport -a 1 -f 80 24
lfcrouter1# portcfg fciptunnel ge1 create 0 remote-ip local-ip 700000 -c (fciptunnel 0 on ge1 with 700Mb/s commited bandwidth and compression enabled)
lfcrouter2# portcfgvexport -a 1 -f 81 24 
lfcrouter2# portcfg fciptunnel ge1 create 0 remote-ip local-ip 700000 -c (fciptunnel 0 on ge1 with 700Mb/s commited bandwidth and compression enabled)
rfcrouter1# portcfg fciptunnel ge1 create 0 remote-ip local-ip 700000 -c (fciptunnel 0 on ge1 with 700Mb/s commited bandwidth and compression enabled)
rfcrouter2# portcfg fciptunnel ge1 create 0 remote-ip local-ip 700000 -c (fciptunnel 0 on ge1 with 700Mb/s commited bandwidth and compression enabled)

lfcrouter1# portpersistentenable 24
lfcrouter2# portpersistentenable 24
rfcrouter1# portpersistentenable 24
rfcrouter2# portpersistentenable 24

Create ISL's from fcrouters to directors
Attach Fiber cable from lfcrouter1 to director1
Attach Fiber cable from lfcrouter2 to director2
Attach Fiber cable from rfcrouter1 to rdirector1
Attach Fiber cable from rfcrouter2 to rdirector2

On the directors I then create 2 LSAN zones with the Storage Array port WWN and the Host port WWN, map a couple of luns and BOOM the host in the remote datacenter sees the LUNs from the Primary DataCenter.

I am attaching a 7500 Supported configuration document as well that may help you with choosing your supported configuration for FC routing.