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Tag Archives: vsphere replication

SRM 5.1.1 and vSphere Replication 5.1.1 released

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As of this evening, both Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication have been updated and the 5.1.1 release is now available.  I strongly recommend this build as even though there is little in the way of new functionality, it is almost completely filled with things that make SRM and VR work better.

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.1.1 | Build 1082082  
VMware vSphere Replication 5.1.1 | Build 1079383

Some of the fixed issues, for example, are things like:

  • All sorts of timeout problems ranging from multiple operation timeouts to reprotect timeouts to HBA rescan timeouts
  • Custom vCenter https ports now work better with vSphere Replication
  • Pairing SRM servers using custom certificates and VCVA now works
  • Re-protect using vSphere Replication is more resilient

Two things in particular that I want to highlight though are really nice to see are listed below.

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SRM Updates – 5.1.0.1 and 5.0.2 Released

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Along with the vCenter 5.1.0B release, we now also have a few interesting updates in the Site Recovery Manager world that were just released.

First, for those of you not yet ready to upgrade to 5.1, we have an SRM 5.0.2 release with a few minor but important fixes and improvements.

  • A handful of new operating systems are now supported for customization (including Windows 8, W2K12, RHEL 6.2/6.3, and Ubuntu 12.04).
  • vSphere Replication accepts MD5 certificates
  • The OpenSSL implementation has been upgraded to 0.9.8t
  • Autogenerated certificates are now 2048 bit
  • And the are a raft of resolve issues.

Go check out the full list of features at the Site Recovery Manager 5.0.2 Release Notes page!

For those of you, however, who are running the latest release, SRM 5.1.0.1 was also released.  This one is mostly dealing with resolving two outstanding issues in SRM 5.1.  Those issues that are fixed are:

  • Installing SRM 5.1 or upgrading to SRM 5.1 using an imported certificate fails
    If you attempt to install SRM 5.1 or upgrade to SRM 5.1 using an imported PKCS12 certificate rather than an auto-generated certificate, the installer runs to completion but then fails with the error Failed to install certificate. See KB 2036909. This issue has been fixed in SRM 5.1.0.1.
  • SRM Server on the recovery site fails during cleanup of recovery plans
    SRM Server on the recovery site fails repeatedly during cleanup if there is nothing to clean up, for example if there are no LUNs to detach, or no datastores to unmount. This problem occurs when the command to start the test recovery from SRM Server to the SRA reports success with at least one LUN, but finds no LUNs when the ESXi hosts on the recovery site run a rescan. This issue has been fixed in SRM 5.1.0.1.

So this too is a pretty small release, but better to get patched and up to date under controlled circumstances, rather than trying to fix problems during an emergency!

Keep in mind as well – if you’re upgrading SRM and using vSphere Replication: You will need to upgrade vSphere Replication at the same time to match the SRM version.  In this case you may actually already be running VR at the latest version, but please make sure you check the revisions of VC, SRM, and VR to make sure they work correctly together!

Check out the SRM 5.1 Release Notes Page for further information about SRM 5.1 in general.

-Ken

*** Postscript ***

Since writing this blog, I’ve been asked a few times about upgrades.  Please note that the 5.0.2 patch is a “later” release than the 5.1 release, and that they are completely separate code branches. This means there is NO direct upgrade path from 5.0.2 to 5.1.0.x.

In essence, if you’re running 5.0.x make sure you upgrade to the latest version of 5.0.x but when it comes time to move to 5.1 you’re going to do a forklift upgrade for all intents and purposes.  5.0 and 5.1 are separate products, and patches are only valid within their own major branch.

Tagging VMkernel Traffic Types Using ESXCLI 5.1

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In earlier releases of ESXi, a VMkernel interface could transport three types of traffic: Management, vMotion and Fault Tolerance. To enable a particular traffic type, one would use either the vSphere Web/C# Client or the vSphere API. Some of you may have recalled using an undocumented command-line tool called vim-cmd in the ESXi Shell to enable vMotion and Fault Tolerance traffic. An issue with this tool is it does not support the Management traffic type. This made it a challenge to completely automate the provisioning of VMkernel interfaces from a scripted installation (kickstart) perspective and required the use of remote CLI/APIs to enable the Management traffic type.

Luckily in vSphere 5.1, we now have an easy way of tagging these various traffics types for a VMkernel interface using the new ESXCLI 5.1.

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Is vSphere Replication storage agnostic even when using SRM?

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In short: Yes, it sure is!

In this post I’ll show 6 VMs being protected with vSphere Replication.  2 VMs each will reside on fibre channel data stores (EMC CX4), iSCSI data stores (Falconstor NSS Gateway), and an NFS datastore (EMC VNX5500).  I’ll replicate them onto different datastores, fail them over, reprotect, and fallback.

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vSphere Replication Videos

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Some of you may not yet have seen vSphere Replication in action.  VR was introduced about a year ago as part of Site Recovery Manager, but was spun out as a standalone feature of vSphere 5.1 in September 2012.

We did a couple of short videos of VR in action without SRM, that are now available on Youtube.  The first clip shows how to protect a VM through the web client using vSphere Replication.

As you can see, setting up a VM to be protected is a pretty easy process.  As for recovering a VM, we’ve got that covered as well with the second video.

Let me know what you think of the videos, and if there are other things you’d like to see shown in video format – I’m always looking for feedback on what you’d like to see on the Uptime blog!

-Ken

Stop vs Pause with vSphere Replication

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Something to be aware of with regards to vSphere Replication is how we handle stopping vs pausing replication.  With a pause we temporarily stop shipping differential data to the recovery site, but with a stop we completely stop the replication, remove it from the UI *and delete the recovery data*.

Let’s take a look at this.

Say we have a VM that’s replicated, in this example “TestSRV1″.

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We can see the replication in the “Outgoing Replications” tab, everything is looking good.  We can go take a look at the recovery site datastore to see what files are there.

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