HP StorageWorks Storage Mirroring Virtual Recovery Assistant user's guide (T2558-96323, April 2009)

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Introduction

Storage Mirroring Virtual Recovery Assistant (VRA) is used to

protect entire physical and/or virtual source machines to virtual

target machines running on VMware ESX Server. In addition to

providing the proven Storage Mirroring byte-level replication,

monitoring, and failover technologies, the Storage Mirroring Virtual Recovery Assistant greatly

simplifies the setup of the target virtual machines by automating the virtual machine provisioning

process.

Storage Mirroring Virtual Recovery Assistant uses a client/server architecture.

 The Storage Mirroring Virtual Recovery Assistant clients are used to create protection jobs.

 The target VMware ESX host server is a physical machine that the VMware ESX host software

runs on. The Virtual Recovery Appliance and any replica virtual machines will reside on this ESX

host.

 The Virtual Recovery Appliance is a virtual machine running on the target VMware ESX host.

The Virtual Recovery Appliance serves as a communication and management hub for all Storage

Mirroring Virtual Recovery Assistant activities. Some of its functions include:

 Handling all ESX server communication (for example, it creates the virtual server, creates

disks, mounts disks, formats disks, and dismount disks)

 Creating and controlling the Storage Mirroring job.

 Reporting the Storage Mirroring Virtual Recovery Assistant state to the clients.

 Virtual replica machines are hosted by the VMware ESX host server. The virtual replica

machines are created by the source protection job using the Virtual Recovery Appliance, but

remain powered off until failover. At failover, the replica machine is powered on and assumes the

identity of the original source machine.

Storage Mirroring Virtual Recovery Assistant uses Storage Mirroring to configure the replication set

and monitor failover conditions. For more information on Storage Mirroring system requirements, see

the Storage Mirroring User’s Guide or online documentation.

Storage Mirroring VRA clients

Source Machine 1

Source Machine 2

C:\

D:\

Source Machine 1_Replica

Source Machine 2_Replica

Virtual Recovery Appliance

Target VMware ESX Host Server

System C:\

Replica1_C:\

Replica2_C:\

Replica2_D:\

ESX Datastore