ESX Site Recovery Manager with NetApp Storage

I'm happy to report that configuring SRM using NetApp storage and SnapMirror is a relatively straightforward operation. That is to say, not any surprises and things pretty much work like you'd expect. The nifty thing about NetApp is that it doesn't require identical arrays at each site; in fact, you can have small regional VM farms (running on something like a small workgroup FAS2040) and SRM those back to your core datacenter running a big-dog FAS6280. I don't have that kind of horsepower to play with in the lab, but down below I'll show you how I protected a FAS270 from yester-year up to a larger 3020 array. And for fun, I did it across a T-1 line. Your mileage may vary, and your co-workers will likely be peeved when you hog up all the bandwidth during that initial sync (I know mine were). Incremental sync jobs afterwards didn't produce hardly any complaints, by the way.The video doesn't detail the initial software installation. Suffice to say, you'll need the SRM installalable from VMware and the NetApp SRA, which is helpfully called the NetApp Disaster Recovery Adapter (NOW login required to download) if you're searching for it. Both should be installed on a dedicated SRM systems, one at the primary site and one at the recovery site.
Other things you will need:

• A NetApp head at each site, running at least OnTAP 7.2.4
• A SnapMirror license installed at each site
• A SnapMirror relationship defined and established for your primary datastore
• A FlexClone license (required only to enable the test failover function, as demonstrated in the video)

There's a couple of 'gotchas' when planning this configuration too, at least with 1.4 version of the SRA:

• The datastore FlexVols can only have a single SnapMirror relationship, which is to the secondary location. No daisy-chains. This also limits the ability to have multiple recovery sites for a single primary site.
• Replication should be done with plain-old Volume SnapMirror. (Qtree-SnapMirror might work and isn't explicitly unsupported, but would be an unwise plan).
• SyncMirror however is explicitly unsupported in conjunction with SRM. That should present less of an issue. If you're lucky enough to have SyncMirror, your single ESX cluster should probably span the two sites. So no SRM required. You can still run regular SnapMirror along with SyncMirror to get the VMs off to a third more distant location.

ESX Site Recovery Manager with NetApp Storage