EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5.1, Federation Software ... · PDF fileSolution Guide EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5.1, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition Data Protection

Solution Guide

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5.1, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition

Data Protection Continuous Availability Solution Guide

Abstract

This Solution Guide provides an introduction to data protection through continuous availability. The guide enables you to begin the planning and design of continuous availability for an EMC® Enterprise Hybrid Cloud™ 2.5.1, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition solution.

December 2014

2

Copyright © 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA.

Published December 2014

EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice.

THE INFORMATION IN THIS PUBLICATION IS PROVIDED AS IS. EMC CORPORATION MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND WITH RESPECT TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PUBLICATION, AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC software described in this publication requires an applicable software license.

EMC2, EMC, Avamar, Data Domain, Data Protection Advisor, EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, Enginuity, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, GeoSynchrony, PowerPath/VE, RecoverPoint, SMI-S Provider, Solutions Enabler, Symmetrix VMAX, Syncplicity, Unisphere, ViPR, EMC ViPR Storage Resource Management, Virtual Storage Integrator, VNX, VPLEX, VPLEX, Geo, VPLEX Metro, and the EMC logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

For the most up-to-date listing of EMC product names, see EMC Corporation Trademarks on EMC.com.

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5.1, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition Data Protection Continuous Availability Solution Guide

Part Number H13684

http://www.emc.com/legal/emc-corporation-trademarks.htm

http://www.emc.com/legal/emc-corporation-trademarks.htm

Contents

3

Contents

Chapter 1 Executive Summary 8

Document purpose ..................................................................................................... 9

Audience .................................................................................................................... 9

Solution purpose ...................................................................................................... 10

Business challenge .................................................................................................. 11

Technology solution ................................................................................................. 11

Chapter 2 EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution Overview 13

Introduction ............................................................................................................. 14

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud features and functionality ........................................... 15

Automation and self-service provisioning ............................................................ 15

Multitenancy and secure separation .................................................................... 16

Workload-optimized storage ................................................................................ 16

Elasticity and service assurance .......................................................................... 16

Operational monitoring and management ........................................................... 17

Metering and chargeback .................................................................................... 18

Modular add-on components ............................................................................... 18

Chapter 3 Continuous Availability Architecture 21

Overview .................................................................................................................. 22

Key components for Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud ........... 22

VMware vSphere 5.5 ............................................................................................ 23

EMC VPLEX .......................................................................................................... 23

Hybrid cloud data protection ............................................................................... 24

Solution architecture ................................................................................................ 25

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud software resources ................................................. 28

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud sizing ..................................................................... 28

Chapter 4 Solution Design Considerations 30

Overview .................................................................................................................. 31

Network topology considerations ............................................................................. 31

Data Center Interconnect (DCI) ............................................................................. 31

General VPLEX considerations .................................................................................. 34

VPLEX Witness considerations .................................................................................. 34

Contents

4

vSphere HA considerations ...................................................................................... 35

Total path failures ................................................................................................ 35

Datastore heartbeat ............................................................................................. 37

Deployment considerations ...................................................................................... 39

Uniform host access configuration with VPLEX Cross-Connect ............................. 39

Chapter 5 VPLEX Automation with ViPR 45

Overview .................................................................................................................. 46

ViPR configuration ............................................................................................... 46

Discovering VPLEX with ViPR ..................................................................................... 47

ViPR virtual arrays .................................................................................................... 49

ViPR virtual pools ..................................................................................................... 52

ViPR tenants ............................................................................................................. 55

ViPR projects ............................................................................................................ 57

ViPR consistency groups ........................................................................................... 58

Use cases ................................................................................................................. 58

Use case 1: Storage provisioning ......................................................................... 58

Use case 2: Select virtual machine storage .......................................................... 62

Chapter 6 Backup in a CA Environment 65

Overview .................................................................................................................. 66

Key backup components ...................................................................................... 66

Backup architecture in a Continuous Availability environment.................................. 67

Backing up with dual Avamar instances ............................................................... 67

Avamar and Data Domain integration with VMware .............................................. 69

Avamar client registrations .................................................................................. 69

Avamar proxy server configuration ....................................................................... 69

Replication of Backup Data ...................................................................................... 70

Avamar replication............................................................................................... 70

Policy-based replication ...................................................................................... 70

Replication control............................................................................................... 71

CA Backup Use Cases ............................................................................................... 71

Use Case 1: On-Demand Backup ......................................................................... 71

Use Case 2: On-Demand Restore ......................................................................... 72

Use Case 3: Toggling Avamar Designations .......................................................... 73

Use Case 4: Remediate Secondary Avamar Policies .......................................... 73

Use Case 5: Triggering Avamar Replication .......................................................... 74

Contents

5

Chapter 7 Conclusion 76

Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 77

Chapter 8 References 78

EMC documentation ................................................................................................. 79

Other documentation ............................................................................................... 79

Contents

6

Figures Figure 1. Hybrid cloud solution stack ................................................................. 10

Figure 2. EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud key components ..................................... 14

Figure 3. Self-service provisioning via the vCAC self-service portal ..................... 16

Figure 4. EMC ViPR Analytics with VMware vCenter Operations Manager ............ 17

Figure 5. IT Business Management Suite overview dashboard for hybrid cloud .. 18

Figure 6. Solution architecture ........................................................................... 26

Figure 7. Terminology interaction ....................................................................... 27

Figure 8. Cloud management platform ............................................................... 28

Figure 9. Data center interconnections ............................................................... 33

Figure 10. High-level deployment of EMC VPLEX Witness ..................................... 35

Figure 11. Edit cluster settings ............................................................................. 36

Figure 12. Example of APD advanced system settings .......................................... 37

Figure 13. Das.heartbeatDsPerHost setting .......................................................... 37

Figure 14. Stretched cluster distributed volumes ................................................. 38

Figure 15. Consistency group properties .............................................................. 38

Figure 16. Datastore heartbeat ............................................................................ 39

Figure 17. Deployment model with VPLEX Cross-Connect ..................................... 40

Figure 18. VPLEX storage views ............................................................................ 41

Figure 19. Datastore displayed in EMC Virtual Storage Integrator ......................... 42

Figure 20. Add storage system ............................................................................. 48

Figure 21. Discovered VPLEX clusters ................................................................... 48

Figure 22. ViPR virtual data center ....................................................................... 49

Figure 23. Virtual arrays ....................................................................................... 50

Figure 24. Details of VA-S1 .................................................................................. 51

Figure 25. Interactions between VPLEX local and VPLEX distributed pools ........... 53

Figure 26. Block virtual pools ............................................................................... 53

Figure 27. Create a virtual pool with VPLEX local high availability ........................ 54

Figure 28. Create a virtual pool with VPLEX distributed high availability ............... 55

Figure 29. Authentication providers ..................................................................... 56

Figure 30. Tenant details ..................................................................................... 57

Figure 31. Role assignments ................................................................................ 57

Figure 32. Storage Services: Provision cloud storage ........................................... 59

Figure 33. Provision cloud storage: Select vCenter cluster.................................... 60

Figure 34. Storage provisioning: Select datastore type......................................... 60

Figure 35. vCAC storage provisioning: Choose ViPR storage pool ......................... 61

Figure 36. Storage provisioning: Enter storage size .............................................. 61

Contents

7

Figure 38. Set storage reservation policy for VMDKs ............................................. 63

Figure 39. Dual Avamar backup architecture ........................................................ 68

Figure 40. Select on-demand backup for the virtual machine ............................... 72

Figure 43. Remediating the secondary Avamar policies ........................................ 74

Chapter 1: Executive Summary

8

Chapter 1 Executive Summary

This chapter presents the following topics:

Document purpose ..................................................................................................... 9

Audience .................................................................................................................... 9

Solution purpose ..................................................................................................... 10

Business challenge .................................................................................................. 11

Technology solution................................................................................................. 11


9

Document purpose

This Solution Guide describes a Continuous Availability for EMC® Enterprise Hybrid Cloud™ 2.5.1, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition solution.

The Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution is a modular add-on to the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution. EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5.1, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition: Foundation Infrastructure Reference Architecture and EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5.1, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition: Foundation Infrastructure Solution Guide describe the reference architecture and the foundation solution on which all the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud add-on solutions are built.

The following guides provide further information about how to implement specific capabilities or enable specific use cases within the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution:

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5.1, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition: Data Protection Disaster Recovery Solution Guide

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5.1, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition: Data Protection Backup Solution Guide

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5.1, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition: Microsoft Applications Solution Guide

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5 with VMware: Hadoop Applications Solution Guide

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5 with VMware: Pivotal CF Platform as a Service Solution Guide

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5 with VMware: Public Cloud Solution Guide

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5 with VMware: Security Management Solution Guide

Audience

This Solution Guide is intended for executives, managers, architects, cloud administrators, and technical administrators of IT environments who want to implement continuous availability for a hybrid cloud IaaS platform. Readers should be familiar with the VMware vCloud Suite, storage technologies, general IT functions and requirements, and how they fit into a hybrid cloud architecture.


10

Solution purpose

The Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution enables Federation customers to build an enterprise-class, scalable, multitenant infrastructure that enables:

Complete management of the infrastructure service lifecycle

On-demand access to and control of network bandwidth, servers, storage, and security

Provisioning, monitoring, protection, and management of the infrastructure services by the line of business users, without IT administrator involvement

Maximum asset utilization

Application services: A single platform for both business-critical and next-generation cloud applications

This solution provides a reference architecture and the best practice guidance that is necessary to integrate continuous availability functionality for a hybrid cloud, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Hybrid cloud solution stack


11

Business challenge

Business leaders typically demand that their organization addresses the following fundamental challenges:

Providing shareholder value by increasing revenues

Improving competitiveness by driving business agility

Increasing investment by lowering operational costs

Limited choice of availability and protection services

The difficulty in overcoming these challenges has given rise to public cloud providers who have built technology and business models specifically catering to the requirements of end-user agility and control. Many organizations are under pressure to provide these same service levels within the secure and compliant confines of the on-premises data center. As a result, IT departments need to create cost-effective alternatives to public cloud services, alternatives that do not compromise enterprise features such as data protection, disaster recovery, and guaranteed service levels.

As IT organizations implement a hybrid cloud, they must consider the following factors:

The infrastructure must be quick to deploy so that business value can be recognized quickly.

The hybrid cloud infrastructure and operations must be designed to reduce costs through higher utilization and higher staff productivity.

Risk of downtime must be controlled through disaster-avoidance techniques such as continuous availability, disciplined change control, and careful management of component compatibility.

All of these services (including continuous availability) need to be accessible on demand through a self-service portal with elasticity, financial transparency, and operational control. In other words, they need to be delivered as a cloud service.

Support agreements must be established for all elements of the solution.

Technology solution

The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution integrates the best of EMC and VMware products and services, and empowers IT organizations to accelerate implementation and adoption of the hybrid cloud while still enabling customer choice for the compute and networking infrastructure within the data center. The solution caters both to customers who want to further use their existing infrastructure and to those who want to build out new infrastructures dedicated to the hybrid cloud.

The solution takes advantage of the strong integration between EMC technologies and the VMware® vCloud® Suite developed by EMC and VMware product and services


12

teams. This includes using EMC scalable storage arrays and integrated EMC and VMware monitoring and data protection suites to ensure that the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution becomes the foundation for enabling infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

This Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution uses EMC and VMware technologies (in particular, EMC VPLEX® and VMware vSphere® High Availability (HA)) to enable continuous availability as a service within the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution.

The components for the Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution are described in Key components for Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud.

Chapter 2: EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution Overview

13

Chapter 2 EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution Overview


Introduction ............................................................................................................. 14

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud features and functionality .......................................... 15


14

Introduction

The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution is an engineered solution that offers IT organizations, developers, end users, and line-of-business owners a simplified approach to IT functionality. In addition to delivering baseline IaaS, built on a software-defined data center architecture, the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud delivers feature-rich capabilities to expand from IaaS to business-enabling IT as a service (ITaaS). Backup-as-a-service (BaaS) and disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) policies can be enabled with just a few mouse clicks. End users and developers can quickly access a marketplace of resources for Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, EMC Syncplicity, and Pivotal applications, and can add third-party packages as required. Resources can be deployed on private cloud or EMC-powered public cloud services, including VMware vCloud® Air™.

The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution uses the best of EMC and VMware products and services, and takes advantage of the strong integration between EMC and VMware technologies to provide the foundation for enabling IaaS on new and existing infrastructure for the hybrid cloud.

Figure 2 shows the key components of the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution.

Figure 2. EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud key components

For detailed information, refer to EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5.1, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition: Foundation Infrastructure Solution Guide. For information on EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud modular add-on solutions, which provide functionality such as data protection, application services, and platform as a service, refer to Modular add-on components. For detailed information on the add-on solutions, refer to the individual Solution Guides for those solutions.


15

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud features and functionality

The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution incorporates the following features and functionality:

Automation and self-service provisioning

Multitenancy and secure separation

Workload-optimized storage

Elasticity and service assurance

Operational monitoring and management

Metering and chargeback

Modular add-on components

The solution provides self-service provisioning of automated cloud services to both users and infrastructure administrators. It uses VMware vCloud Automation Center™ (vCAC), integrated with EMC ViPR® software-defined storage and VMware vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS) or VMware NSX™, to provide the compute, storage, network, and security virtualization platforms for the software-defined data center.

Cloud users can request and manage their own applications and compute resources within established operational policies. This can reduce IT service delivery times from days or weeks to minutes. Automation and self-service provisioning features include:

Self-service portal—Provides a cross-cloud storefront that delivers a catalog of custom-defined services for provisioning applications based on business and IT policies, as shown in Figure 3

Role-based entitlements—Ensure that the self-service portal presents only the virtual machine, application, or service blueprints appropriate to a user’s role within the business

Resource reservations—Allocate resources for use by a specific group and ensure that access is limited to that group

Service levels—Define the amount and types of resources that a particular service can receive during initial provisioning or as part of configuration changes

Blueprints—Contain the build specifications and automation policies that specify the process for building or reconfiguring compute resources



16

Figure 3. Self-service provisioning via the vCAC self-service portal

The solution provides the ability to enforce physical and virtual separation for multitenancy, as strongly as the administrator requires. This separation can encompass network, compute, and storage resources to ensure appropriate security and performance for each tenant.

The solution supports secure multitenancy through vCAC role-based access control (RBAC), which enables vCAC roles to be mapped to Microsoft Active Directory groups. The self-service portal shows only the appropriate views, functions, and operations to cloud users, based on their role within the business.

The solution enables customers to take advantage of the proven benefits of EMC storage in a hybrid cloud environment. Using ViPR storage services, and the capabilities of EMC VNX® and EMC VMAX®, and EMC XtremIO™ storage systems, the solution provides software-defined, policy-based management of block- and file-based virtual storage. ViPR abstracts the storage configuration and presents it as a single storage control point, enabling cloud administrators to access all heterogeneous storage resources within a data center as if the resources were a single large array.

The solution uses the capabilities of vCAC and various EMC tools to provide the visibility and alerting required to proactively ensure service levels in virtual and cloud environments. Infrastructure administrators manage storage, compute, and network resources within resource pools, while cloud users manage those resources at the virtual machine level. Cloud users can select from a range of service levels for





17

compute, storage, and data protection for their applications and can expand the resources of their virtual machines on demand to achieve the service levels required by their application workloads.

The solution features automated monitoring and management capabilities that provide IT administrators with a comprehensive view of the cloud environment to enable intelligent decision making for resource provisioning and allocation. These automated capabilities are based on a combination of EMC ViPR Storage Resource Management (ViPR SRM), VMware vCenter™ Log Insight™, and VMware vCenter Operations Manager™ (vC Ops), and use EMC plug-ins for ViPR, VNX, VMAX, XtremIO, and EMC Avamar® systems to provide extensive additional storage detail.

Cloud administrators can use ViPR SRM to understand and manage the impact that storage has on their applications and to view their storage topologies from application to disk, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. EMC ViPR Analytics with VMware vCenter Operations Manager

Capacity analytics and what-if scenarios in vC Ops identify over-provisioned resources so they can be right sized for the most efficient use of virtualized resources. In addition, VMware vCenter Log Insight provides the ability to centralize and aggregate system and application logs. Each system in the solution can be configured to forward logs to Log Insight for event analytics and reporting.

Operational monitoring and management


18

The solution uses VMware IT Business Management (ITBM) Suite™ to provide cloud administrators with comprehensive metering and cost information across all business groups in the enterprise. ITBM is integrated into the cloud administrator’s self-service portal and presents a dashboard overview of the hybrid cloud infrastructure, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. IT Business Management Suite overview dashboard for hybrid cloud

The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution provides modular add-on components for the following services:

Application services

This add-on solution uses VMware vCloud Automation Center Application Services to optimize application deployment and release management through logical application blueprints in vCAC. Users can quickly and easily deploy blueprints for applications and databases such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint, Oracle, and SAP.

Data protection: Backup

Avamar and EMC Data Domain® systems provide a backup infrastructure that offers features such as deduplication, compression, and VMware integration. By using VMware vCenter Orchestrator™ (vCO) workflows customized by Federation, administrators can quickly and easily set up multitier data protection policies data that users can assign when they provision their virtual machines.


Modular add-on components


19

Data protection: Continuous availability

A combination of EMC VPLEX virtual storage and VMware vSphere High Availability (HA) provides the ability to federate information across multiple data centers over synchronous distances. With virtual storage and virtual servers working together over distance, the infrastructure can transparently provide load balancing, realtime remote data access, and improved application protection.

Data protection: Disaster recovery

This add-on solution enables cloud administrators to select disaster recovery (DR) protection for their applications and virtual machines when they provision their hybrid cloud environment. ViPR automatically places these systems on storage that is protected remotely by EMC RecoverPoint®. VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager™ automates the recovery of all virtual storage and virtual machines.

Platform as a service

The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution provides an elastic and scalable IaaS foundation for platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) services. Pivotal CF provides a highly available platform that enables application owners to easily deliver and manage applications over the application lifecycle. The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud service offerings enable PaaS administrators to easily provision compute and storage resources on demand to support scalability and growth in their Pivotal CF enterprise PaaS environments.

Public cloud services

The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution enables IT organizations to broker public cloud services. The public cloud solution has been validated with VMware vCloud® Air™ as a public cloud option that administrators and users can access directly from the solution's self-service portal. End users can provision virtual machines while IT administrators can use VMware vCloud Connector™ to perform virtual machine migration (offline) to vCloud Air from the on-premises component of their hybrid cloud.


20

Chapter 3: Continuous Availability Architecture

21

Chapter 3 Continuous Availability Architecture


Overview .................................................................................................................. 22

Key components for Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud ......... 22

Solution architecture ............................................................................................... 25


22

Overview

The Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution is built on the proven design of the VMware vSphere/EMC VPLEX Metro™ storage cluster and VPLEX. Using the features and functionality of Metro, this solution offers the following benefits:

Workload mobility

Disaster avoidance

Locality independence

Location optimized storage

Increased uptime and utilization

Storage automation

Storage for the solution is provided by VMAX or VNX arrays located at both data center sites that host the infrastructure. The storage is presented to the VPLEX arrays, also located at both sites, and is used to form distributed storage that is kept synchronized and presented to the vSphere cluster as active/active LUNs.

VMware vCO is central to all the customizations and operations used in this solution and manages operations across several EMC and VMware products, including:

VMware vCAC

VMware vCenter

EMC ViPR

This solution focuses on continuous availability in a hybrid cloud environment. The implementation that is described represents one possible way of meeting the requirements.

Key components for Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud

The key components of the foundation EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution are described in the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5.1, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition: Foundation Infrastructure Solution Guide.

The key components for the Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution include:

VMware vSphere 5.5

VMware vSphere vMotion

VMware vSphere High Availability

EMC VPLEX


23

EMC VPLEX Metro

EMC VPLEX Witness

EMC Avamar data protection

EMC Data Domain data protection (optional)

EMC Data Protection Advisor

VMware vSphere delivers uncompromised control over all IT resources with the highest efficiency in the industry. vSphere comprises a number of features that transform industry-standard hardware into a shared, mainframe-like resilient environment with built-in service level controls for all applications.

vSphere makes it simpler and less expensive to provide higher levels of availability for important applications. With vSphere, organizations can easily increase the baseline level of availability provided for all applications. vSphere makes it possible to reduce both planned and unplanned downtime.

VMware vSphere vMotion

VMware vSphere vMotion—a key feature of the enterprise virtual infrastructure—enables live migration of a running virtual machine from one physical host to another. Migration of a virtual machine with vMotion preserves the precise execution state of the virtual machine. The execution state consists of physical memory, storage, network connections, and the virtual device state, including the state of the CPU, network and disk adaptors, and SVGA. The virtual machine continues to run throughout the migration process with minimal impact to the user workload and no disruption to network connectivity.

VMware vSphere High Availability

VMware vSphere HA provides easy-to-use, cost-effective high availability for applications running in virtual machines. In the event of physical server failure, affected virtual machines are automatically restarted on other production servers with spare capacity. In the case of operating system failure, vSphere HA restarts the affected virtual machine on the same physical server. The combination of VMware HA and the other availability features of the vSphere platform provides organizations with the ability to select and easily deliver the level of availability required for all of their important applications.

The EMC VPLEX family removes physical barriers within, across, and between data centers. VPLEX Local provides simplified management and non-disruptive data mobility for heterogeneous arrays. VPLEX Metro and EMC VPLEX Geo™ provide data access and mobility between two VPLEX clusters within synchronous and asynchronous distances respectively. With a unique scale-out architecture, VPLEX advanced data caching and distributed cache coherency provide:

Workload resiliency

Automatic sharing, balancing, and failover of storage domains

VMware vSphere 5.5

EMC VPLEX


24

Local and remote data access with predictable service levels

EMC VPLEX Metro

EMC VPLEX Metro brings mobility and access across two locations separated by an inter-site round trip time of up to 10 ms (host application permitting). VPLEX Metro uses two VPLEX clusters (one at each location) and includes the unique capability to support synchronous distributed volumes that mirror data between the two clusters using write-through caching.

Since a VPLEX Metro distributed volume is under the control of the VPLEX Metro advanced cache coherency algorithms, active data I/O access to the distributed volume is possible at either VPLEX cluster. VPLEX Metro is a truly active/active solution that goes beyond traditional active/passive legacy replication solutions.

EMC VPLEX Witness

VPLEX Witness provides VPLEX with the capability for applications to survive any storage failures, including disaster-level scenarios affecting entire racks of storage equipment simultaneously. VPLEX Witness provides automatic restart in the event of any server failures and all failures are handled automatically without any human intervention or complicated failover processes. VPLEX Witness can distinguish between a site or link failure, and can enable hosts, servers, and applications to fail over in step with VPLEX while keeping applications online.

For VPLEX Metro deployments, VPLEX Witness enables a high-availability solution with zero recovery point objective (RPO). For all VPLEX deployments over distance, VPLEX Witness provides a unique and robust enhancement for resiliency, high availability, and seamless failover.

EMC Avamar

EMC Avamar is a fast, efficient backup and recovery system that is provided through a complete software and hardware solution. Equipped with integrated variable-length deduplication technology, Avamar backup and recovery software provides integrated source and global data deduplication, which facilitates fast, full daily backups for hybrid cloud environments.

EMC Data Domain

With Avamar, you can choose to direct backups to an EMC Data Domain system instead of the Avamar server. Data Domain deduplication storage systems deduplicate data inline so that data is written already deduplicated on the disk and requires less disk space than the original dataset. With Data Domain, you can retain backup and archive data on site longer to enable quick and reliable data restores from disk.

EMC Data Protection Advisor

With EMC Data Protection Advisor (DPA), you can automate and centralize the collection and analysis of all data across backup applications, replication technologies, the virtual environment, and supporting infrastructure. This provides a

Hybrid cloud data protection


25

single, comprehensive view of your data protection environment and activities. In addition, when integrated with vCO workflows, DPA can be used to provide on-demand reporting of backup statistics and status.

Solution architecture

This solution describes the environment created for supporting the continuous availability of the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud infrastructure.

Figure 6 shows the overall architecture of the Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution. The infrastructure is designed to be geographically dispersed across separate data centers with the use of two VPLEX clusters in a VPLEX Metro configuration. All the critical components that support the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud are placed on VPLEX distributed volumes so they are continuously available across both locations.

The VPLEX Witness server is deployed as a virtual appliance running on a customer’s VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi™) host that is deployed in a failure domain separate from both of the VPLEX clusters. This provides an additional level of protection in case of an inter-cluster network partition failure or a VPLEX cluster failure.


26

Figure 6. Solution architecture


27

A cloud management platform supports the entire management infrastructure for this solution. This platform includes several pods, consisting of ESXi clusters, which perform solution-specific functions, and are used to provide high availability and load balancing as appropriate.

The use of ESXi clusters with vSphere HA provides general virtual machine protection. Additional levels of availability can be provided by using nested clustering between the virtual machines themselves, such as Windows Failover Clustering, PostGresQL clustering, load balancer clustering, or farms of machines that work together natively, to provide a resilient architecture.

Figure 7 shows how the terms platform, pod, and cluster are used in this guide.

Figure 7. Cloud management terminology and hierarchy

The tenant resource pods supporting the various organizations within the enterprise are managed by a vCenter Server instance located on the cloud management platform. This server acts as the vSphere end-point for vCAC.

All server and virtual machine components for the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Core Pod are managed by a separate, higher level vCenter Server instance that can also be located in the cloud management platform, but for highest possible availability, could be located on a separate system. Figure 8 shows the default configuration of two vCenters where the first vCenter supports the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Core Pod and the second vCenter supports the remaining cloud management pods and tenant resources.


28

Figure 8. Cloud management platform

For information about qualified components and versions required for the initial release of EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5.1, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition, refer to the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5.1, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition: Foundation Infrastructure Reference Architecture. For up-to-date supported version information, refer to EMC Simple Support Matrix: EMC Hybrid Cloud 2.5 at elabnavigator.emc.com.

For all EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud sizing operations, refer to the EMC Mainstay sizing tool at mainstayadvisor.com/go/emc.

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud software resources

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud sizing

https://elabnavigator.emc.com/

https://mainstayadvisor.com/go/emc


29

Chapter 4: Solution Design Considerations

30

Chapter 4 Solution Design Considerations


Overview .................................................................................................................. 31

Network topology considerations ............................................................................ 31

General VPLEX considerations ................................................................................. 34

VPLEX Witness considerations ................................................................................. 34

vSphere HA considerations ...................................................................................... 35

Deployment considerations ..................................................................................... 39


31

Overview

This chapter focuses on general design and deployment considerations and options for the Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution.

Network topology considerations

Data centers that are connected together over a metro link can use either Layer 2 bridged VLAN connectivity or Layer 3 routed IP connectivity.

Both of these Data Center Interconnect (DCI) options have their advantages and disadvantages. However, new standards and technologies, such as Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN), address most of the disadvantages.

Traditional disadvantages of Layer 2 DCI

The risks related to Layer 2 extensions between data centers mirror some of the limitations faced in traditional Ethernet broadcast domains.

The limiting factor is the scalability of a single broadcast domain. A large number of hosts and virtual machines within a broadcast domain, all contending for shared network resources, can result in broadcast storms. The results of broadcast storms are always to the detriment of network availability, adversely affecting application delivery and ultimately leading to a poor user experience. This can affect productivity.

As the continuous availability architecture is stretched across both data centers, the broadcast storm can cause disruption in both the primary and secondary data centers.

Multiple Layer 2 interconnects create additional challenges for stretched networks. If unknown broadcast frames are not controlled, loops in the Layer 2 extension can form. This can potentially also cause disruption across both data centers, resulting in network downtime and loss of productivity.

The Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) needs to be run and carefully managed to control loops across the primary and secondary site interconnecting links.

Loop avoidance and broadcast suppression mechanisms are available to the IT professional, but must be carefully configured and managed.

Traditional advantages of Layer 2 DCI

The greatest advantage of Layer 2 DCI is the IP address mobility of physical and virtual machines across both data centers. This simplifies disaster recovery in the event of a failure in the primary data center.

Note: Layer 2 connectivity can often be an application necessity where heartbeats and clustering techniques are used across multiple hosts. In some cases, the technologies might not be able to span Layer 3 boundaries.

Data Center Interconnect (DCI)


32

Traditional disadvantages of Layer 3 DCI

In the event of an infrastructure failure at the primary site, a machine migrated to the secondary data center must be reconfigured to use alternate IP addressing schemes. This can be more time consuming and error prone than having a high-availability deployment across a single Layer 2 domain.

Intersite machine clustering may not be supported over a Layer 3 boundary, which can either be multicast or broadcast based.

Traditional advantages of Layer 3 DCI

Layer 3 DCI does not use extended broadcast domains or require the use of STP. Therefore, there is greater stability of the production and services networks across both primary and secondary data centers.

DCI networking solution

The network topology used in the Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution incorporates the advantages of both Layer 2 and Layer 3 DCI topologies. Layer 2 requirements such as resource and management traffic are handled by the VXLAN implementation enabled by VMware NSX. This offers the advantage of IP mobility across both sites by placing the resource and management traffic on spanned VXLAN segments. It also eliminates the complexity of STP and performance degradation that large broadcast domains can introduce.

VXLANs can expand the number of Layer 2 domains or segments beyond the 802.1q limit of 4,096 VLANs to a theoretical limit of 16 million. VXLANs can also extend the Layer 2 environment over Layer 3 boundaries.

An underlying Layer 3 data center interconnect runs a dynamic route distribution protocol with rapid convergence characteristics such as Open Shortest Path First (OSPF). OSPF routing metrics route the ingress traffic to the primary data center. If the primary data center is unavailable, the OSPF algorithm automatically converges routes to the secondary data center. This is an important advantage compared to using a traditional Layer 2 DCI and Layer 3 DCI solution in isolation.

Note: NSX also supports Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and Intermediate System to Intermediate System (IS-IS) route distribution protocols.


33

Figure 9 shows two data centers connected with a routed Layer 3 IP link.

Figure 9. Data center interconnections

The primary data center extends three VXLANs across to the secondary data center, over a routed IP link. Figure 9 shows the internal management, external management, and resources segments.


34

Note: vCNS requires that the VTEP endpoints are able to use multicast to learn the location of all virtual machines on the VXLAN segment given that vCNS does not have the ability to offload this to a controller function in the same way as NSX. As a result, while vCNS may be suitable for a continuous availability environment, it does depend on the ownership of the Layer 3 boundaries or whether multicast routing is permissible.

Each of the three management pods that make up the cloud management platform operate on ESXi clusters that are stretched across both sites, that is, there are nodes from every cluster on both sites. In normal production, the virtual machines that operate the platform are hosted by the ESXi cluster nodes that reside in the primary data center.

vSphere HA, in combination with VPLEX and VPLEX Witness, enables the cloud-management platform virtual machines to restore the cloud-management service on the secondary site in the event of a total loss of the primary data center. In this scenario, the virtual machines automatically move to and operate from the ESXi nodes that reside in the secondary data center.

Note: The data center interconnect physical link is subject to the availability of the local telecommunications service provider, and the business requirement of the enterprise.

This solution has all the advantages of traditional Layer 2 and Layer 3 solutions. It provides increased flexibility and scalability by implementing VXLANs, and benefits from increased stability by not extending large broadcast domains across the Metro.

General VPLEX considerations

The auto-resume configuration option for VPLEX consistency groups must be set to True. This setting ensures that, after failure remediation, any data written to the device on the winning cluster during an outage is resynchronized to the mirror on the losing cluster.

Also, as a minimum, the Federation recommends that you set the detach timer to 5 seconds. Setting the detach delay lower than 5 seconds can result in unnecessary or numerous storage detaches during periods of network instability. Multiple detaches in a short period of time can result in many unnecessary data rebuilds and consequently reduced performance.

VPLEX Witness considerations

VPLEX Witness is an optional component deployed in customer environments where the regular preference rule sets are insufficient to provide seamless zero or near-zero recovery time objective (RTO) storage availability in the event of site disasters or VPLEX cluster and inter-cluster failures.

Without VPLEX Witness, all distributed volumes rely on configured rule sets to identify the preferred cluster in the event of a cluster partition or cluster/site failure. However,


35

if the preferred cluster fails (for example, as a result of a disaster event), VPLEX is unable to automatically enable the surviving cluster to continue I/O operations to the affected distributed volumes. VPLEX Witness is designed specifically overcome this.

The VPLEX Witness server is deployed as a virtual appliance running on a customer’s VMware ESXi host that is deployed in a failure domain separate from both of the VPLEX clusters. This eliminates the possibility of a single fault affecting both the cluster and VPLEX Witness. VPLEX Witness connects to both VPLEX clusters over the management IP network. By reconciling its own observations with the information reported periodically by the clusters, VPLEX Witness enables the clusters to distinguish between inter-cluster network partition failures and cluster failures, and to automatically resume I/O operations in these situations.

Figure 10 shows an example of a high-level deployment of VPLEX Witness and how it can augment an existing static preference solution. The VPLEX Witness server resides in a fault domain separate from the VPLEX clusters on site A and site B.

Figure 10. High-level deployment of EMC VPLEX Witness

vSphere HA considerations

As of ESXi 5.0 Update 1, vSphere can recognize two types of total path failures: Permanent Device Loss (PDL) and All Paths Down (APD). The ESXi server can declare either of these conditions depending on the failure scenario.

Permanent Device Loss

vSphere ESXi has two settings that control the behavior of vSphere HA in response to a SCSI PDL state command. While the suggested values in the following steps for these settings are the default values, it is worth validating that they are configured correctly or vSphere HA may not operate as required.

To ensure that the virtual machine failover behaves correctly, validate the following settings within the vSphere clusters:

Total path failures


36

1. Enable the das.maskCleanShutdownEnabled=true flag in the vSphere cluster HA advanced settings, as shown in Figure 11.

Figure 11. Edit cluster settings

2. On every ESXi server, enable VMkernel.Boot.terminateVMOnPDL, located within the host advanced system settings.

3. Reboot the ESXi server for the settings to take effect.

These settings can be configured as part of a host profile or by using a VMware vSphere PowerCLI™ script (which can be run as part of a bare-metal provisioning vCAC workflow). They can also be configured via the Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE) post-installation script.

With vSphere 5.5, PDL AutoRemove automatically removes a device from a host when the device enters a PDL state. Because vSphere hosts have a limit of 255 disk devices per host, a device that is in a PDL state can no longer accept I/O, but can still occupy one of the available disk device spaces. Therefore, it is better to remove the device from the host.

A PDL AutoRemove operation occurs only if there are no open handles left on the device. The auto-remove takes place when the last handle on the device closes. If the device recovers, or if it is re-added after having been inadvertently removed, it is treated as a new device. PDL AutoRemove is enabled by default in vSphere 5.5.

For more information about PDL AutoRemove, refer to VMware KB Topic 2059622: PDL AutoRemove feature in vSphere 5.5.

All Paths Down

APD is a state where all the paths to a specific volume have disappeared, but no SCSI sense code can be sent by the array (for example, VPLEX) or, alternatively, the ESXi server receives nothing.

An example of this is a dual-fabric failure that causes all of the paths to be down. In this case, no SCSI sense code is generated or sent by the underlying storage array. Even if it were, the host does not receive the signal because there is no connectivity.


37

Another example of an APD condition is a full VPLEX cluster failure. While this is unlikely because there are no single points of failure, it represents a case where a SCSI sense code cannot be generated because the storage hardware is unavailable, and the ESXi server will detect the problem on its own—resulting in an APD state.

vSphere 5.0 Update 1 introduces two settings that alleviate the problems faced by APD scenarios: Misc.APDHandlingEnable and Misc.APDTimeout. When these settings are enabled, an ESXi server attempts to reestablish the connection to a lost device for 140 seconds, after which the connection times out. This prevents the hostd demon from waiting on I/O and in turn locking up the ESXi host. Figure 12 shows an example of these settings.

Figure 12. Example of APD advanced system settings

In this case, the ESXi does not power down the virtual machine, which leaves vSphere HA with no ability to perform a failover. Because there is no communication between the host and the storage system, any VPLEX Witness behavior will have no bearing. This case requires administrator intervention to either resolve the path loss conditions or bring up the virtual machines on the surviving site. For this reason, it is important to design your supporting infrastructure with EMC best practices in mind.

For more information about PDL and APD, refer to VMware KB Topic 2004684: Permanent Device Loss (PDL) and All-Paths-Down (APD) in vSphere 5.x.

For vSphere HA datastore heartbeat functionality to operate correctly in any type of failure scenario, VMware recommends increasing the number of heartbeat datastores from two (the default) to four. The minimum number of heartbeat datastores is two and the maximum is five. This enables vSphere HA to detect a datastore’s heartbeat even in the case of a connection failure between sites. Consequently, full redundancy enables vSphere HA to determine the state of a host in any scenario.

Figure 13 shows the das.heartbeatDsPerHost setting in the Advanced Options of vSphere HA. The value is set to 4.

Figure 13. Das.heartbeatDsPerHost setting

Datastore heartbeat


38

Figure 14 displays the CorePod stretched cluster. The distributed volumes being shared by the hosts are highlighted.

Figure 14. Stretched cluster distributed volumes

Each management pod in this solution uses four dedicated VPLEX distributed volumes. We created separate VPLEX consistency groups for each vSphere cluster and assigned the winner for the volumes to VPLEX cluster-1, which is the primary cluster in the configuration. Figure 15 shows the CORE-CG consistency group configured with detach rule Winner:cluster -1.

Figure 15. Consistency group properties

VPLEX consistency groups are used in conjunction with VPLEX Witness, which intervenes and ensures that access to the surviving cluster is automatically maintained regardless of which site fails. Consistency groups also provide a convenient way to apply rule sets and other properties to a group of volumes, which simplifies configuration and administration on large systems.


39

Figure 16 highlights the datastore heartbeat configuration used in this solution. The Select any of the cluster datastores taking into account my preferences setting is used.

Figure 16. Datastore heartbeat

Deployment considerations

VMware classifies the stretched Metro cluster configuration into the following categories:

Uniform host access configuration with VPLEX Cross-Connect—ESXi hosts in a distributed vSphere cluster have a connection to the local VPLEX system and paths to the remote VPLEX system. The remote paths presented to the ESXi hosts are stretched across distance.

Non-uniform host access configuration without VPLEX Cross-Connect—ESXi hosts in a distributed vSphere cluster have a connection only to the local VPLEX system.

Note: At the time of publication of this guide, the Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution does not support the non-uniform host access configuration.

EMC GeoSynchrony® 5.0 introduces the concept of a VPLEX Metro cluster with Cross-Connect. This configuration provides a perfect platform for a uniform vSphere stretched-cluster deployment. VPLEX Cross-Connect is designed to be deployed in a metropolitan-type topology with latency that does not exceed 1 ms round-trip time (RTT).

ESXi hosts can access a distributed volume on the local VPLEX cluster and on the remote cluster in the event of a failure. When this configuration is used in conjunction with VPLEX Witness, ESXi hosts are able to survive through multiple types of failure

Uniform host access configuration with VPLEX Cross-Connect


40

scenarios. For example, in the event of a VPLEX cluster or back-end storage array failure, the ESXi hosts can still access the second VPLEX cluster with no disruption in service.

In the unlikely event that the preferred site fails, VPLEX Witness intervenes and ensures that access to the surviving cluster is automatically maintained. In this case, vSphere HA automatically restarts all affected virtual machines.

For more information about the different types of failure scenarios and their outcome, refer to:

Using VPLEX Metro with VMWare High Availability and Fault Tolerance for Ultimate Availability

VMware KB Topic 2007545: Implementing vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) using EMC VPLEX

Figure 17 shows a uniform deployment model with VPLEX Cross-Connect.

Figure 17. Deployment model with VPLEX Cross-Connect

This type of deployment is designed to provide the highest possible availability for an EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud environment. It can withstand multiple failure scenarios including switch, VPLEX, and back-end storage at a single site with no disruption in service.

Figure 17 also shows that all ESXi hosts are connected to the VPLEX clusters at both sites. This can be achieved in a number of ways:

Merge switch fabrics by using Inter-Switch Link (ISL) technology used to connect local and remote SANs.

Connect directly to the remote data center fabric without merging the SANs.

For reasons of performance and availability, the Federation recommends that separate host bus adapters be used for connecting to local and remote switch fabrics.


41

Note: VPLEX Cross-Connect is configured at the host layer only and does not imply any cross connection of the back-end storage. The back-end storage arrays remain locally connected to their respective VPLEX clusters.

From the host perspective, in the uniform deployment model with VPLEX Cross-Connect, the ESXi hosts are zoned to both the local and the remote VPLEX clusters. This is shown in Figure 18, which displays the VPLEX storage views for host DRM-ESXi088, physically located in Site 1 of our environment.

Here the initiators for the host are registered and added to both storage views with the distributed device being presented from both VPLEX clusters.

Figure 18. VPLEX storage views

This configuration is transparent to the ESXi host. The remote distributed volume is presented as an additional set of paths. Figure 19 shows the eight available paths that are presented to host DRM-ESXi088, for access to the VPLEX distributed volume hosting datastore CC-Shared-M3-.


42

Figure 19. Datastore displayed in EMC Virtual Storage Integrator

The serial numbers of the arrays are different because four of the paths are presented from cluster-1; the remaining four are presented from cluster-2.

By default, PowerPath/VE sets all VPLEX devices to the adaptive multipath policy. Neither the host nor the multipath software can by themselves distinguish between local and remote paths. This poses a potential impact on performance if remote paths are used for I/O in normal operations because of the cross-connect latency penalty.

To prevent the host from accessing the remote paths during normal operation, the Federation recommends that you enable the PowerPath/VE auto-standby mode. Figure 19 also shows auto-standby mode enabled on host DRM-ESXi088. PowerPath/VE has automatically identified all remote paths and set them to standby (asb :prox). This level of automation would not be possible with the round-robin or fixed policies offered by the native multipathing software.

PowerPath/VE groups paths internally by VPLEX cluster. The VPLEX cluster with the lowest minimum path latency is designated as the local/preferred VPLEX cluster, while the other VPLEX cluster within the VPLEX Metro system is designated as the remote/non-preferred cluster. A path associated with the local/preferred VPLEX cluster is put in active mode, while a path associated with the remote/non-preferred VPLEX cluster is put in auto-standby mode. This forces all I/O during normal operations to be directed towards the local VPLEX cluster. In the event of a failure


43

where the paths to the local VPLEX cluster are lost, PowerPath/VE activates the standby paths and the host remains up and running on the local site.


44

Chapter 5: VPLEX Automation with ViPR

45

Chapter 5 VPLEX Automation with ViPR


Overview .................................................................................................................. 46

Discovering VPLEX with ViPR .................................................................................... 47

ViPR virtual arrays.................................................................................................... 49

ViPR virtual pools ..................................................................................................... 52

ViPR tenants ............................................................................................................ 55

ViPR projects............................................................................................................ 57

ViPR consistency groups .......................................................................................... 58

Use cases ................................................................................................................. 58


46

Overview

With the integration of ViPR with VPLEX Metro, the Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution can orchestrate the on-demand provisioning of active/active storage across geographically dispersed sites. Using the ViPR plug-in for vCO enables seamless integration between vCAC and ViPR. A vSphere cluster spanning multiple sites is able to simultaneously run active workloads on both sites.

This solution ensures that a highly resilient infrastructure is built that can withstand multiple disaster scenarios with little or no impact on business operations. With this functionality, the enterprise provides a simplified service to its end users while removing them from the underlying architecture.

The integration of ViPR with VPLEX Metro for the solution requires that ViPR is configured and has discovered the following physical assets:

Storage arrays

EMC VPLEX

VMware vCenter

vSphere clusters

ESXi hosts

Fabric managers

This chapter does not discuss basic ViPR setup and discovery operations. This chapter focuses on the setup of the individual components needed for the creation of the Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution. For detailed ViPR configuration information, refer to the EMC ViPR 2.0.0 Installation and Configuration Guide.

ViPR requires the following components:

Physical devices

Virtual arrays

Virtual pools

Consistency groups

Tenant details

Project details

After ViPR is fully configured, VPLEX Local virtual storage and VPLEX Metro distributed storage can easily be provisioned to or removed from hosts.

ViPR configuration


47

To provision or remove VPLEX storage with ViPR, you can use the API, CLI, or built-in services under Block Storage Services and Block Protection Services from the ViPR Service Catalog GUI. You can perform the following operations from the ViPR Service Catalog:

Create a block volume for a host

Create block volumes

Remove block volumes

Expand a block volume

Export a VPLEX volume

Export a volume to a host

Unexport a volume

Change a virtual pool

Change a virtual array

The ViPR 2.0 suite has full support for VPLEX Metro clusters. ViPR is able to provision local and distributed storage in uniform deployments with VPLEX Cross-Connect. In a cross-connected environment, ViPR is able to zone host adapters and create distributed storage across both VPLEX clusters.

Note: The new volume needs to be exported from both virtual arrays in order to be visible to all hosts in the ESXi stretched cluster. The dual export is automatically executed by the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud STaaS workflows.

Discovering VPLEX with ViPR

To use ViPR with VPLEX, you need to discover the back-end storage arrays, VPLEX clusters, hosts to which you intend to provision storage, and attached fabrics. For discovery and management activities, ViPR uses the VPLEX Element Manager API.

ViPR treats the VPLEX systems as a storage system physical asset and, therefore, by default, automatically rediscovers them every 60 minutes. To discover a VPLEX system, you specify the following information in the ViPR UI, as shown in Figure 20:

IP address of the VPLEX system’s management server

Port number for the API (443 by default)

Credentials to access the system


48

Figure 20. Add storage system

After you save this information, ViPR automatically performs an initial discovery of both the VPLEX clusters.

Figure 21 shows the discovered VPLEX clusters in our environment and the other storage arrays that are automatically discovered when you enter the SMI-S Provider information into the storage providers. ViPR automatically discovers the remote system. The system name comprises the two VPLEX serial numbers.

Figure 21. Discovered VPLEX clusters

For more information about the ViPR discovery process, refer to the EMC ViPR Administrator Guide.


49

ViPR virtual arrays

A virtual array is an abstract or logical array that you create to partition a virtual data center into a group of connected compute, network, and storage resources. A virtual data center is typically partitioned into virtual arrays for fault tolerance, network isolation, or tenant isolation.

A virtual array can span multiple physical arrays; conversely, a physical array can be partitioned into multiple virtual arrays. Virtual arrays can also be connected through disaster recovery and high-availability links in environments using EMC RecoverPoint and VPLEX Metro configurations.

As shown in Figure 22, a virtual array is defined by network connectivity and includes:

SAN switches/fabric managers within the networks

IP networks connecting the storage systems and hosts

Host and storage ports connected to the networks

ViPR virtual pools

In addition to network connectivity, a virtual array is associated with one or more virtual pools.

Figure 22. ViPR virtual data center


50

After ViPR fully discovers the physical assets, you must then create virtual arrays and virtual pools. Each virtual array you create should contain both the VPLEX cluster and the block arrays that are local to it, that is, those to which it is physically connected and zoned. There must be at least one virtual array for each VPLEX cluster.

By configuring the virtual array this way, ViPR knows where to get the back-end storage and which VPLEX cluster to use when block storage with VPLEX is requested.

Note: Proper planning is essential because it is not possible to change the configuration after resources have been provisioned without first disruptively removing the provisioned volumes.

Within the Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution, we have defined two virtual arrays, as shown in Figure 23. We deployed two block virtual arrays, each abstracting a VPLEX cluster at a specific site.

Figure 23. Virtual arrays

The VA-S1 instance comprises storage networks, ports, and pools associated with the physical storage arrays on Site 1, as shown in Figure 24.


51

Figure 24. Details of VA-S1

You can configure ViPR to handle all zoning operations by setting it to automatic mode. Because this may not be suitable for all deployments, manual mode is also available. When a storage network is associated with the virtual array, ViPR automatically discovers all of the physical arrays and their associated ports and pools.

When you create a virtual array, you must manually select individual storage and VPLEX ports and add them to the virtual array. This method must be used to select individual ports from the back-end array that have been specifically designated for use with VPLEX protected storage.

Both the back-end and front-end ports from the VPLEX and the ports from the appropriate back-end array should be added to the virtual array. The same virtual array must not and cannot contain ports from both VPLEX clusters. This is required to differentiate each cluster in each site and ensure that the correct back-end storage array is used in conjunction with the VPLEX cluster in the same geographical location.


52

ViPR virtual pools

Virtual pools are sets of file and block storage capabilities used to abstract the physical storage layer. Virtual pools can be designed to meet various service levels, availability requirements, and cost requirements. Rather than provisioning storage on physical arrays, virtual pools are used to meet the storage requirements.

This solution uses the ViPR API, which is integrated with the ViPR plug-in for vCO and vCAC. This enables you to provision local or distributed storage in a manner abstracted from the individual physical pools of storage, and based instead on the functionality of the virtual storage pool.

You create and configure the virtual pools within a virtual data center. You define a set of storage service capabilities (such as type of storage (file or block), size of storage, availability, and performance characteristics), and then associate it with physical storage pools on the arrays managed by ViPR. You must properly set up the virtual pools because they are the drivers for all future provisioning tasks performed by end users.

Note: After you provision storage from a particular virtual pool, changes permitted to that pool are limited. For example, a virtual pool can be modified by adding more storage pools. However, other options, such as hardware and SAN multipath, cannot be modified.

Virtual pools for block storage offer two options under High Availability: VPLEX local and VPLEX distributed. When you specify local high availability for a virtual pool, the ViPR storage provisioning services create VPLEX local virtual volumes. If you specify VPLEX distributed high availability for a virtual pool, the ViPR storage provisioning services create VPLEX distributed virtual volumes.

To configure a VPLEX distributed virtual storage pool through ViPR:

1. Ensure a virtual array exists for both sites, with the relevant physical arrays associated with those virtual arrays. Each VPLEX cluster must be a member of the virtual array at its own site only.

2. Before creating a VPLEX Metro virtual pool at the primary site, create a VPLEX local pool at the secondary site. This is used as the target virtual pool when creating VPLEX distributed virtual volumes.

3. When creating the VPLEX distributed volume on the source site, select the storage pool in the primary site, the remote virtual array, and the remote VPLEX local pool. This pool is used to create the remote mirror volume that makes up the remote portion of the VPLEX virtual volume. VPLEX Distributed ViPR Virtual Storage Pool 1, as shown in Figure 25, represents this configuration.


53

Figure 25. Interactions between VPLEX local and VPLEX distributed pools

Figure 26 shows the ViPR virtual pools that we created in the ViPR instance. Not shown are details such as pools, pool assignment, protocols, and the number of resources provisioned.

Figure 26. Block virtual pools

For the Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution, we implemented the following design:

VPLEX Site 2—Local pool used for VPLEX Site 2 volume creation and as the HA pool in the distributed configuration. This is used as the target for the VPLEX METRO pool.

VPLEX METRO—Distributed pool used for distributed volume creation. This pool uses the VPLEX Site 2 pool as the HA site.

Figure 26 also shows an additional pool labeled VPLEX Site 1. With VPLEX, either site is capable of being the primary leg of a distributed volume. If volumes were created where the remote site was the primary leg, this pool would be used to store the secondary legs of those volumes. In our example, this pool remains unused.


54

To create a VPLEX local high availability virtual pool:

1. Select the virtual array with which the virtual pool will be associated.

2. Under Hardware, select Multi-Volume Consistency to ensure resources provisioned from this pool supports the use of consistency groups. (For more information, refer to ViPR consistency groups.)

3. Specify the required characteristics for the back-end storage volumes that ViPR creates and that serve as the VPLEX local virtual volumes.

4. Select VPLEX Local for High Availability as shown in Figure 27.

Figure 27. Create a virtual pool with VPLEX local high availability

5. Within Storage Pools, select Manual under Pool Assignment if you want to manually manage the storage pools from which storage will be consumed. To have ViPR manage the storage pools, leave the setting as Automatic.

6. Click Save.

To create a VPLEX distributed high availability virtual pool:

1. Select the virtual array with which the virtual pool will be associated.

2. Under Hardware, select Multi-Volume Consistency to ensure resources provisioned from this pool will support the use of consistency groups.

3. Specify the required characteristics for the back-end storage volumes that ViPR creates and that serve as the VPLEX distributed virtual volumes.


55

4. Select VPLEX Distributed for High Availability as shown in Figure 28.

Figure 28. Create a virtual pool with VPLEX distributed high availability

5. Within Storage Pools, select Manual under Pool Assignment if you want to manually manage the storage pools from which storage will be consumed. To have ViPR manage the storage pools, leave the setting as Automatic.

6. Click Save.

ViPR tenants

ViPR is designed to operate in a multitenant environment. A tenant represents an organization operating within the ViPR virtual data center. Tenants are created in the ViPR virtual data center to isolate organizations from each other in a cloud service-provider infrastructure.

Each tenant is configured with its own list of mapped users, who are authenticated to perform provisioning operations within that tenant. When a tenant administrator creates a tenant, the administrator maps the users into the tenant by specifying the user domains, user attributes, or group memberships that exist in the ViPR virtual data center.

These domains and user groups are available in the ViPR virtual data center because the security administrator adds users into the system by accessing existing Active Directory or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) accounts. These Active Directory or LDAP user groups, domains, and attributes are specified in the authentication provider’s set up by the security administrator to bring users into the entire virtual data center. The tenant administrator uses the existing user domains and related user attributes to specify which groups of users the administrator wants to map into the tenant.

The ViPR virtual data center is organized such that there is a root tenant called the provider tenant. The provider tenant would be the cloud service provider in a public cloud deployment or potentially an entire enterprise IT organization in a hybrid cloud


56

deployment. The provider tenant could remain largely unused except for the actual creation of new distinct tenants for the applicable organization.

A user with the tenant administrator role, may create tenants under the provider root tenant, where each tenant is configured with its own list of mapped users who are allowed to operate within the tenant.

Note: In API and CLI, tenants are referred to as subtenants.

A tenant has a maximum total storage capacity (quota) associated with it that cannot be exceeded. The used and maximum total capacity values for a tenant are included in ViPR metering records.

Tenant access to virtual arrays and virtual pools can be controlled by an Access Control List (ACL). Virtual arrays and virtual pools are accessible to all tenants by default. However, a system or security administrator can assign an ACL to a virtual array or virtual pool to restrict their use to specified tenants only.

To set up a tenant, ViPR needs the authentication provider to be set up first, followed by tenant creation and role assignments. Figure 29 shows the authentication provider we set up in the solution environment.

Figure 29. Authentication providers

Figure 30 and Figure 31 show the tenant details and role assignments for the authentication provider we set up in the solution environment.


57

Figure 30. Tenant details

Figure 31. Role assignments

ViPR projects

A ViPR project is a logical grouping of resources mapped to applications, virtual data centers, departments, or other entities meaningful to the user.

Users can create their own projects within their tenant, and they can provision multiple storage resources from different data services to their projects (for example, storage volumes, file systems, or objects such as files or images). Resources from one project can be shared between users under the same tenant. Examples of using projects include:

A user creates a project for a photo-album application and provisions one block volume for a user account database and one datastore for storing the pictures.

A user creates a project named VDC Datastores and provisions it into multiple volumes for use by the ESX cluster.

A tenant administrator creates a project for use by a specific department.


58

Only tenant administrators and project administrators can create projects. One level of projects can be created under a tenant. A tenant administrator has full management access to all projects within the tenant. A project administrator can create projects but cannot manage the resources within the project.

A project has a maximum total storage capacity (quota) associated with it that cannot be exceeded. The used and maximum total capacity values for a project are included in ViPR metering records.

ViPR consistency groups

Consistency groups are an important component of the Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution. Consistency groups aggregate volumes together to ensure a set of common properties is applied to the entire group of volumes during a fault event. This ensures that host-cluster or application-level consistency is achieved and no critical virtual volumes are left behind when a failover occurs.

VPLEX Witness helps multi-cluster VPLEX configurations automate the response to cluster failures and inter-cluster link outages. VPLEX Witness connects to both VPLEX clusters over the management IP network and observes the state of the clusters.

VPLEX Witness can distinguish between an outage of the inter-cluster link and a cluster failure and uses this information to guide the clusters to resume or suspend I/O operations.

In this solution, ViPR uses VPLEX consistency groups created within the ViPR project associated with the tenant during VPLEX distributed virtual volume provisioning. The VPLEX cluster that is in the virtual array used for the provisioning task is configured to be the winning cluster that continues I/O operations in the event of an inter-cluster link failure.

Use cases

This use case demonstrates how ViPR continuously available software-defined storage is provisioned for the hybrid cloud from the VMware vCAC Self-Service Catalog.

VMware vCAC IaaS users can provision continuously available storage from the vCAC Self-Service Portal, where they can select the storage provisioning item from the vCAC Self-Service Catalog, as shown in Figure 32.

Use case 1: Storage provisioning


59

Figure 32. Storage Services: Provision cloud storage

The storage service blueprint can be created using vCAC anything-as-a-service (XaaS) functionality in the vCAC Advanced Service Designer. EMC ViPR provisioning workflows, which are presented by vCO to the vCAC service catalog, support storage services.

The storage provisioned by the IaaS user enables the fabric group administrator to make storage resources available to their business group. The storage provisioning request requires very little input from the vCAC IaaS user. The main inputs required are:

vCenter cluster (select the relevant CA-enabled ESXi cluster)

Storage type: VMFS CA-Enabled

Storage tier

Datastore size

Most of these inputs, except datastore size, are selected from lists whose items are determined by the cluster resources available through vCenter and the virtual pools available in ViPR.

vCenter cluster

After the user has entered a description and reason for the storage-provisioning request, the user is prompted to enter a password and presented with the Choose vCenter Cluster option, as shown in Figure 33.


60

Figure 33. Provision cloud storage: Select vCenter cluster

vCenter Server manages multiple ESXi clusters; therefore, the correct vCenter cluster must be selected to instruct the provisioning operation where to assign the storage device.

Storage type

The user can select which type of datastore is required from a list, based on the storage types in the underlying infrastructure. A datastore type of VMFS requires block storage, while NFS requires file storage. Other data services such as disaster recovery and continuous availability are displayed only if they are detected in the underlying infrastructure.

In this case, only VMFS CA-Enabled is applicable as shown in Figure 34.

Figure 34. Storage provisioning: Select datastore type

Storage Tier

On Storage Tier, the user must select the storage tier from which the new storage device should be provisioned. The list of available tiers is based on the storage type


61

selected, such as VMFS or NFS, and what matching virtual pools are available from the ViPR virtual array.

In this example, a single VPLEX Metro-based ViPR virtual pool is available from which to provision storage, with the available capacity of the virtual pool also displayed to the user, as shown in Figure 35.

Figure 35. vCAC storage provisioning: Choose ViPR storage pool

These storage tiers have been configured in the ViPR virtual array and their storage capabilities are associated with storage profiles created in vCenter.

Datastore size

On Datastore Size, the user must enter the size required for the new storage, which is measured in GB, as shown in Figure 36.

Figure 36. Storage provisioning: Enter storage size

Additional steps

In this example, a number of required input variables, such as LUN or datastore name, have been masked from the user during the storage provisioning request process. Some of these values are locked in and managed by the orchestration process and logic to ensure consistency.


62

Beyond the initial provisioning of storage to the ESXi cluster at the vSphere layer, this solution provides further automation and integration of the new storage into the vCAC layer. The ViPR storage provider automatically tags the storage device with the appropriate storage profile based on its storage capabilities.

The remaining automated steps in this solution are:

vCAC rediscovers the resources under the vCenter endpoint

vCAC storage reservation policy is assigned to the new datastore

vCAC fabric group administrator is notified of the availability of a new datastore

In the last manual step, the fabric group administrator reserves the new storage for use by the business group, as shown in Figure 37.

Figure 37. Storage provisioning: Storage reservation for vCAC business group

The automated process sends an email notification to the fabric group administrator that the storage is ready and available in vCAC. The administrator can then assign capacity reservations on the device for use by the business group.

This use case demonstrates how cloud users can consume the available storage service offerings. This use case is part of the broader virtual machine deployment use case, but it is highlighted here because it relates directly to how the business group manager and users can manage the storage service offerings available to them.

VMware vCAC business group managers and users can select the appropriate storage for their virtual machine through the VMware vCAC user portal.

For business group managers, the storage type for the VMDKs can be set during the creation of a virtual machine blueprint. As shown in Figure 38, the appropriate storage reservation policy can be applied to each of the virtual disks.

Use case 2: Select virtual machine storage


63

Figure 38. Set storage reservation policy for VMDKs

When the storage reservation policy is set, the blueprint will always deploy this virtual machine and its virtual disks to that storage type. If more user control is required at deployment time, the business group manager can permit business group users to reconfigure the storage reservation policies at deployment time by selecting Allow users to see and change storage reservation policies.


64

Chapter 6: Backup in a CA Environment

65

Chapter 6 Backup in a CA Environment


Overview .................................................................................................................. 66

Backup architecture in a Continuous Availability environment................................. 67

Replication of Backup Data ...................................................................................... 70

CA Backup Use Cases ............................................................................................... 71


66

Overview

This modular add-on for continuous availability extends the services documented in the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5.1, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition: Data Protection Backup Solution Guide, which discusses the general considerations for implementing data protection in an EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud by using the features and functionality of Avamar, Data Domain, and Data Protection Advisor. This chapter focuses on the additional considerations that are relevant to doing the same thing in the context of a Continuous Availability environment

Backup and recovery of a multitenant hybrid cloud is a complicated endeavor in which many factors must be considered, including:

Backup type and frequency

Impact and interaction with replication

Recoverability methods and requirements

Retention periods

Implementation in an HA/disaster recovery-enabled environment

Automation workflows

Interface methods (workflows, APIs, GUI, CLI, scripts, and so on)

VMware vCO, which is central to all of the customizations and operations used in this solution, manages operations across several EMC and VMware products, including:

VMware vCAC

VMware vCenter

EMC Avamar and Data Protection Advisor

This Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution focuses on the management and automation aspects of a hybrid cloud, and the data protection implementation that is described represents one possible way of meeting the requirements. the Federation strongly recommends that you engage an Avamar product specialist to design, size, and implement a solution specific to your environment and business needs.

EMC Avamar backup and recovery

Avamar backup and recovery is a fast, efficient system that is provided through a complete software and hardware solution. Equipped with integrated variable-length deduplication technology, Avamar backup and recovery software provides integrated source and global data deduplication, which facilitates fast, daily full backups for hybrid cloud environments.

EMC Data Domain system

With Avamar backup and recovery, you can choose to direct backups to an Data Domain system instead of to the Avamar server. Data Domain deduplication storage systems deduplicate data inline, so that it lands already deduplicated on disk and

Key backup components


67

requires less disk space than the original dataset. With the Data Domain system, you can retain backup and archived data onsite longer to enable quick and reliable data restores from disk.

EMC Data Protection Advisor software

With DPA software, you can automate and centralize the collection and analysis of all data across backup applications, replication technologies, the virtual environment, and supporting infrastructure. This provides a single, comprehensive view of your data protection environment and activities. DPA provides a REST API that is used to integrate with vCO to provide on-demand reporting of backup statistics and performance.

EMC data protection workflows for vCenter Orchestrator

EMC has created data protection workflows for vCO to automate Avamar and Data Domain protection of virtual machines. These workflows are added to the vCAC virtual machine provisioning blueprints so that users can easily set up protection at provisioning time. In addition, workflows can be used to enable simple or point-in-time restores for a specific virtual machine.

Infrastructure administrators can also use the data protection workflows to carry out the complete protection policy setup on Avamar and vCenter systems, to facilitate quick and easy deployment of the infrastructure needed to support all of the end-user protection needs.

Backup architecture in a Continuous Availability environment

Avamar is capable of bi-directional replication between multiple Avamar instances. This lends itself well to protecting backup data by replicating backups to the secondary data center in a continuous availability environment. Backup clients should ideally be backed up to a local target, which usually has better bandwidth and lower latency. Avamar deduplicates data during the initial backup process, making it an efficient model for subsequent replication of that data across a WAN connection.

This Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution uses a dual Avamar configuration with replication of backup sets between sites controlled by Avamar replication technology. EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud uses the concepts of primary and secondary Avamar instances, and the ability to reverse these personalities so that, in the event of a failure, backup and restore operations can continue.

The primary Avamar instance is the instance where all scheduled backups are executed. It is also the instance that the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud on-demand backup and restore features communicate with in response to dynamic user requests. The primary Avamar instance also has all the currently active replication groups, making it responsible for replication of new backup sets to the secondary Avamar instance.

Backing up with dual Avamar instances


68

The secondary Avamar instance has all the same configurations with respect to backup and replication policies. They are however initially configured in a disabled state by the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud workflows. Should the primary Avamar instance become unavailable, the policies on the secondary Avamar instance can be enabled to allow backup and replication operations to continue.

Note: Replication operations do not catch up until the original primary Avamar instance (now designated as secondary) becomes available again, at which time replication automatically transmits newer backup sets to the secondary system.

In this Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution, after a dual Avamar configuration is enabled, the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud workflows configure all subsequent backups with replication enabled.

Figure 39 shows the architecture and data flows for a dual-site Avamar/Data Domain backup architecture.

Figure 39. Dual Avamar backup architecture


69

Avamar is integrated with VMware VADP, which enables seamless integration into cloud environments, and provides backup capabilities using the Changed Block Tracking (CBT) feature within the API.

The virtual machine instant-access capability in EMC Avamar 7.0 enables you to use the flexibility of the Data Domain systems, where you can boot and run a virtual machine from a backup image in seconds.

Combining these features with the Avamar deduplication process results in much less data travelling through the virtual and physical network, and greatly reduces the amount of data being physically stored.

When you select a Data Domain system as the backup target, backup data is transferred directly to the Data Domain system. The related metadata generated by the Avamar client software is simultaneously sent to the Avamar server for storage. The metadata enables the Avamar management system to perform restore operations directly from the Data Domain system without first going through the Avamar server.

In this Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution, when an end-user resource virtual machine is enabled for backup, the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud workflows automatically register the virtual machine with both the primary and secondary Avamar instances, making them a part of the relevant backup and replication policies on both sites. This permits the secondary Avamar instance to assume responsibility for scheduled and on-demand backups should the primary fail.

During on-demand restore operations, the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud workflows interact with the Avamar instance currently designated as the primary, and present a consolidated list of backups taken over time, automatically handling the restore process from the back end to the target virtual machine. This means that backups taken on either site are then visible (once replicated) and associated with the virtual machine irrespective of which site that virtual machine is currently running on.

Virtual machines are always restored from data on the Avamar instance designated as the primary instance.

The Federation recommends that a minimum of two Avamar proxy virtual appliance be deployed per CA-enabled cluster in vCenter (one per site), assuming that each cluster has a unique set of LUNs or vSphere datastores. To avoid backup over the WAN, keep the Avamar Proxy virtual appliances bound to their respective site by deploying them to non-VPLEX-enabled datastores or by setting VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) affinity rules on the cluster. If you use affinity rules, the Federation recommends that:

Affinity rules are configured to ensure that half the Avamar proxies remain bound to the hosts on Site A, and the other half bound to the hosts on Site B.

Anti-affinity rules are configured on each site to ensure that the proxies bound to that site are distributed among the hosts on that site.

Avamar and Data Domain integration with VMware

Avamar client registrations

Avamar proxy server configuration


70

Each proxy appliances should be registered with the Avamar server local to its own site. One Avamar proxy virtual appliance registers eight proxy clients to the Avamar server.

The backup or Avamar administrator can configure Avamar proxy clients to be dedicated to specific backup service levels if required. By default, the Avamar proxy clients are available to service operations of all backup service levels and are automatically selected at the time of backup.

When a new storage device is created and assigned to a vSphere cluster, the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud STaaS workflows automatically add the relevant datastore to the list of datastores protected by the Avamar proxy servers.

Replication of Backup Data

The Avamar replication process copies client backups from a source Avamar server to a destination Avamar server. This enables you to avoid data loss if the source Avamar server fails, as the backup sets are still available via the surviving Avamar server.

Avamar replication is supported irrespective of whether the backup data is being stored on an Avamar Data Store or on Data Domain nodes.

The replication between primary and replica Data Domain systems is integrated into the Avamar management feature set and is configured via the Avamar Administrator through the Avamar replication policies that are applied to each dataset. When you use a Data Domain system with Avamar, the replication process transfers Avamar data from the source Data Domain system to a destination Data Domain system.

When an Avamar system is configured to use a Data Domain system, there must be a corresponding Data Domain system configured within the destination Avamar server or replication will fail for backups sent to the source Data Domain system.

Avamar replicates the data directly from one Data Domain system to another. Avamar does not stage the data on the Avamar server before replicating the data to the destination Data Domain system. This requires that the source and destination Data Domain systems have network connectivity across the WAN.

Policy-based replication provides granular control of the replication process. With policy-based replication, you create replication groups in Avamar Administrator to define the following replication settings:

Members of the replication group, which are either entire domains or individual clients

Priority for the order in which backup data replicates

Types of backups to replicate based on the retention setting for the backup or the date on which the backup occurred

Maximum number of backups to replicate for each client

Avamar replication

Policy-based replication


71

Destination server for the replicated backups

Schedule for replication

Retention period of replicated backups on the destination server

Backup service-level creation is covered in detail in EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5.1, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition: Data Protection Backup Solution Guide. This solution extends that process by creating a replication group associated with each backup policy and configuring it with a 60-minute stagger to the interval associated with the backup policy. This allows the backups to complete before the replication starts.

Note: This schedule can be manually altered within the Avamar GUI if required, but it is important that changes are made to both the primary and secondary versions of the replication group schedule so that replication will operate as required should the Avamar personalities be reversed.

Avamar is responsible for replication of Avamar data from the source Data Domain system to the destination Data Domain system. As a result, all configuration and monitoring of replication is done via the Avamar server. This includes the schedule on which Avamar data is replicated between Data Domain units.

You cannot schedule replication of data on the Data Domain system separately from the replication of data on the Avamar server. There is no way to track replication by using Data Domain administration tools.

Note: Do not configure Data Domain replication to replicate data to another Data Domain system that is configured for use with Avamar. When you use Data Domain replication, the replicated data does not refer to the associated remote Avamar server.

CA Backup Use Cases

This use case describes how a cloud user can request an on-demand backup of a virtual machine, whenever required, from the vCAC self-service portal. The user does not have to wait for the completion of the backup task. An email notification of the backup status is automatically generated when the task is completed, whether the task succeeded or failed.

After logging in to the vCAC self-service portal, a cloud user can select On Demand Backup from the Actions dropdown list for a virtual machine, as highlighted in Figure 40.

Replication control

Use Case 1: On-Demand Backup


72

Figure 40. Select on-demand backup for the virtual machine

When the task is completed, the user receives an automated email notification with the status of the task. The email status workflow runs asynchronously; therefore, the user does not need to wait for the completion status of the backup.

Restore points of a virtual machine fall into one of two categories:

Backups performed locally to the primary Avamar system.

Replicated backups from the secondary Avamar system where, at some point, the backups were performed on the secondary instance and later replicated to the primary.

During an on-demand restore operation, EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud workflows dynamically interrogate the primary Avamar instance for relevant backups of both types and present a consolidated list of backups for the user to choose from as shown in Figure 41.

Figure 41. Consolidated list of backup points

Restore points that are taken to the other Avamar instance and replicated to the system currently designated as primary, have REPLICATED appended to the end of the backup details.

Use Case 2: On-Demand Restore


73

Based on the choice the user makes, the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud workflows execute the relevant restore tasks to return the virtual machine to the correct point in time. Regardless of where the backup is taken (that is, to which Avamar instance) the data will always be restored from the Avamar system currently configured as the primary.

The Toggle Avamar Designations catalog entry should be used in the event of a failure or planned failover of the primary Avamar instance enabling you to reconfigure the personalities of the primary and secondary Avamar instances as shown in Figure 42. When executed, this service enables the backup and replication policies are enabled on the system chosen to be the primary Avamar instance, and disables the backup and replication policies on the system chosen to be the secondary. Every on-demand backup and restore operation first checks to see which system is primary before executing the relevant tasks.

Figure 42. Setting the primary and secondary Avamar instances

If the original primary Avamar system is offline due to unit or site failure, then the Toggle Avamar Designations service will still enable the polices on the surviving Avamar instance once it is chosen as the primary.

The Toggle Avamar Designations service will, however, be unable to disable the backup and replication policies on the secondary (unavailable) unit until such time as the unit is back online. When that occurs, you can run the Remediate Secondary Avamar Policies workflow to correct the status of the policies on that instance.

In the event that the Toggle Avamar Designations catalog item is executed when one of the Avamar instances is offline, you must ensure that the backup and replication policies on that unit are disabled when the unit comes back online; otherwise, both Avamar instances will attempt to execute parallel scheduled backups of the virtual machines.

Use Case 3: Toggling Avamar Designations

Use Case 4: Remediate Secondary Avamar Policies


74

The Remediate Secondary Avamar Policies catalog item shown in Figure 43 requires no further input. It automatically interrogates the Avamar instance designated as the secondary within the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and disables all the backup and replication policies so that its only function is to receive backup replicas from the primary.

Figure 43. Remediating the secondary Avamar policies

In the event that your backup or Avamar administrator wants to bypass the replication schedule and manually trigger Avamar replication, you can do so via Trigger Avamar Replication service.

The Trigger Avamar Replication service discovers all the replication groups on the primary Avamar instance and enables you to trigger an immediate replication of the chosen group as shown in Figure 44.

Use Case 5: Triggering Avamar Replication


75

Figure 44. Triggering Avamar replication outside the replication schedule

Chapter 7: Conclusion

76

Chapter 7 Conclusion


Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 77

Chapter 7: Conclusion

77

Conclusion

This Continuous Availability for EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition solution enables customers to add continuous availability services to the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution. This extends the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution to provide on-demand cloud services through a self-service portal for even the most demanding enterprise applications.

The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution provides on-demand access and control of infrastructure resources and security while enabling customers to maximize asset utilization. Specifically, the solution integrates all of the key functionality that customers demand of a hybrid cloud and provides a framework and foundation for adding other services.

This solution provides the following features and functionality:

Continuous availability





Monitoring


The solution uses the best of EMC and VMware products and services to empower customers to accelerate the implementation and adoption of hybrid cloud while still enabling customer choice for the compute and networking infrastructure within the data center.

Chapter 8: References

78

Chapter 8 References


EMC documentation ................................................................................................. 79

Other documentation ............................................................................................... 79


79

EMC documentation

These documents are available from the Federation website. Access to online support depends on your login credentials. If you do not have access to a document, contact your Federation representative.

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5.1, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition: Foundation Infrastructure Reference Architecture

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5.1, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition : Foundation Infrastructure Solution Guide

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5.1, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition : Data Protection Disaster Recovery Solution Guide

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5.1, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition : Data Protection Backup Solution Guide

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5.1, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition: Microsoft Applications Solution Guide

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5 with VMware: Hadoop Applications Solution Guide

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5 with VMware: Pivotal CF Platform as a Service Solution Guide

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5 with VMware: Public Cloud Solution Guide

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5 with VMware: Security Management Solution Guide

These documents are available from the EMC.com or EMC Online Support websites. Access to online support depends on your login credentials. If you do not have access to a document, contact your EMC representative.

Implementation and Planning Best Practices for EMC VPLEX Technical Notes

EMC VPLEX Metro Witness Technology and High Availability

Using VPLEX Metro with VMWare High Availability and Fault Tolerance for Ultimate Availability

EMC ViPR Administrator Guide

EMC ViPR 2.0.0 Installation and Configuration Guide

Other documentation

For additional information, refer to the following documents, available on the VMware website.

KB Topic 2004684: Permanent Device Loss (PDL) and All-Paths-Down (APD) in vSphere 5.x

http://www.emc.com/resource-library/resource-library.htm

https://support.emc.com/

http://www.vmware.com/


80

KB Topic 2007545: Implementing vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) using EMC VPLEX

KB Topic 2059622: PDL AutoRemove feature in vSphere 5.5

Documents

EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5.1, Federation Software ... · PDF fileSolution Guide EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud 2.5.1, Federation Software-Defined Data Center Edition Data Protection