We came across issue with SRM Test Failover with EMC Recover Point where the VMs became inaccessible due to lack of Image Access space in Journal Volumes.
They had followed EMC Best Practices of having Journal Volumes of 20% of the total Protected Volume however since the Data Change Rate was quite High after the Test ran for 24 hours it ran out of space
EMC recommended using EMC Recover Point Direct Access instead of Image Access if the Test is going to last for more then 24-48 hours
Also we had this requirement when performing the Test Failover we need to cut network connectivity from Production (Please refer my earlier post for the issue faced and work around applied)
Following are the observations of the Test we conducted
Setup
VMware SRM 5.1
EMC Recover Pont Appliance (RPA) version 3.5.SP1.P2 (o.175)
EMC Recover Point SRA 2.1
Discoveries
Sr. No | Tasks | Observation |
1 | Initiate Test Failover from SRM | All the VMs come up as expected |
2 | Await till the Recovery Plan Pauses |
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3 | Break Network Connection | Replication Status changed to Paused in RPA |
4 | Resume the Recovery Plan and ensure it is successful and VMS are accessible |
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5 | Change Consistency Group Policy to "Group is Managed by Recover Point" |
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6 | Enable Direct Access for the Consistency Group | It threw warning for Removal/Deletion of Journals |
7 | Change Consistency Group Policy to "Group is Managed by SRM" | This is required for Cleanup |
8 | Continue with the Test of Recovered VMs | Verified that there is no impact on recovered VM in terms of Performance/Access This is normal as all the writes from Image Access are being committed to the actual disk on DR side |
9 | Initiate Cleanup from SRM | Replication Status changed from Paused to Paused by System in RPA |
10 | Enable Network Connection | Replication Status Changed from Paused by System to Ready then Initializing and finally to Active in RPA Interesting thing what I found here was RPA doesn’t do a complete initialization, RPA has this concept of short initialization basically it has some bookmarks internally so that it can track the changes that have happened.
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