HP StorageWorks Storage Mirroring for Virtual Infrastructure user's guide (T2558-96086, February 2008)

Storage Mirroring for Virtual Infrastructure user’s guide 1
Introducing Storage Mirroring
®
for Virtual Infrastructure
Storage Mirroring for Virtual Infrastructure is used to protect entire virtual machines on the VMware ESX Server
platform by actively replicating virtual machine files between datastores. Storage Mirroring for Virtual
Infrastructure leverages VMware published and supported web service APIs for snapshot and virtual machine
management, ensuring that protected and replica virtual machines are in known and manageable states. This
ensures that data will be crash-consistent and time-coherent across all virtual disks on the virtual machine.
Storage Mirroring for Virtual Infrastructure can be used to protect any operating system that is supported by
VMware. Storage Mirroring for Virtual Infrastructure protects virtual machines by creating VI snapshots,
actively monitoring and managing those snapshots, and transferring them from the source datastore to the
target datastore.
Storage Mirroring for Virtual Infrastructure uses a client/server architecture. One Storage Mirroring for Virtual
Infrastructure service serves multiple remote Storage Mirroring clients. The Storage Mirroring for Virtual
Infrastructure service may or may not co-locate with the VMware VirtualCenter service.
NOTE: Storage Mirroring for Virtual Infrastructure is supported by VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler
(DRS).
Storage Mirroring clients
VMware VirtualCenter Server/
Storage Mirroring Server
source ESX server
source
datastore
protected
VM snapshots
protected VM files
(*-flat.vmdk, *.vmdk,
*.vmx, etc.)
protected
VM snapshots
protected VM files
(*-flat.vmdk, *.vmdk,
*.vmx, etc.)
target ESX server
synchronization
replication
target
datastore