Users Guide

Operations on Failover Clusters
You can install HIT/Microsoft on any cluster nodes that you use for recovery operations. When you install ASM/ME (as part of
HIT/Microsoft) on computers that are nodes in a failover cluster, the following operations are enabled:
● Creation of Smart Copies and schedule configuration for iSCSI volumes or application components that are designated as a
cluster resource—You can run ASM/ME on any cluster node, however you must perform the operation from the cluster
node that owns the cluster resource.
● Propagation of changes to all cluster nodes—When deleting, disabling, enabling, or modifying schedules on clusters, the
changes are automatically made on all cluster nodes.
● Change detection by ASM/ME—If you make changes with the cluster manager, such as changing the owner of a resource,
ASM/ME automatically detects the change.
● Change all ASM/ME operations on any attached PS Series iSCSI object (volumes or application components) when an object
is not designated as a cluster resource.
● Access and display information for the cluster quorum disk—When ASM/ME is installed on a cluster node that owns the
quorum disk, you can access and display information from the quorum disk. In the ASM/ME GUI, the cluster quorum disk is
identified by the dimmed volume icon.
● Checksum Verification and Soft Recovery—For Exchange application components on supported volumes owned by the node
running ASM/ME, you can run Checksum Verification and Soft Recovery.
● Data Restoration from Smart Copies—You can restore data from Smart Copies when the affected cluster resource volumes
are owned by the cluster node.
● Unmount and Logoff operations—After you use the cluster-available administration tools to manually place a mounted iSCSI
volume in maintenance mode, you can use the Unmount and Logoff operations.
Identifying Cluster Volumes in the ASM/ME GUI
The cluster quorum disk can be located on the array. Although ASM/ME recognizes the quorum disk, it does not allow certain
actions, such as Smart Copy creation, to be performed for the quorum disk.
The properties displayed for an owned cluster resource and an unclustered disk might be the same. However, the available
actions for clustered versus unclustered (or owned/not owned/quorum) disks might differ. Certain actions might be disabled or
appear dimmed with (Disabled reason:) appended to the menu item, and other actions might be enabled, depending on
the disk.
The state of the volume’s physical disk resource (owned/unowned) determines the status after failover.
About Collections
ASM/ME enables you to define a logical collection of volumes, applications, or application components. You can then perform
Smart Copy operations on the entire collection, including the collection-only volumes that support Smart Copies. You can also
modify a collection at any time by adding volumes or removing unwanted volumes.
Take precaution when selecting the components of a collection. Dell recommends only creating collections for related objects to
restore as a group; for example, all the application components for a database. Avoid creating collections that contain volumes
for multiple databases, or collections that include database volumes and volumes used by other, unrelated applications. Ensure
that your collections support your intended backup and restore plans.
When you create a collection, you can include an application or any of its components within the Applications node. If you select
an application component, ASM/ME selects all the volumes that the component uses. Additionally, ASM/ME identifies and
selects additional application components that use that volume. Similarly, if you deselect any volume or component, all
interdependent components are also deselected automatically. ASMCLI handles collection creation differently. See ASMCLI -
createCollection for more information.
Volume-Based Collections
You can specify that a Smart Copy schedule for a collection fail if the collection definition differs from the time the schedule
was created. For a collection containing a group of volumes on which SQL databases are stored, ASM/ME automatically
includes the SQL databases in the collection. For example:
● When you create a volume-based collection, and remove a database from the volumes, the schedule runs successfully and
ASM/ME continues to create a Smart Copy of the collection, even though the collection definition changed.
General ASM/ME Operations
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