Configuring Dell Storage Manager for High Availability Dell Storage Engineering November 2019 A Dell EMC Best Practices Guide
Revisions Date Description November 2016 Initial release November 2019 vVols branding update Acknowledgements Author: Darin Schmitz The information in this publication is provided “as is.” Dell Inc. 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.
Table of contents Revisions.............................................................................................................................................................................2 Executive summary.............................................................................................................................................................4 1 2 Basic protection ...............................................................................................................
Executive summary With Dell™ Storage Manager (DSM) 2016 and later, services that run on the Data Collector server have become a critical piece of infrastructure in the storage area network.
1 Basic protection To protect Dell Storage Manager, there are some initial steps that should be taken to provide the bare minimum protection of the Data Collector and its SQL database. 1.1 Virtual machine Current guidance from the DSM documentation recommends that for best results, the Data Collector be installed onto a Windows Server® virtual machine. High availability features of the VMware and Hyper-V® hypervisors are discussed in section 2. 1.
1.4 Replication If multiple Dell SC Series arrays are available in the environment, replicate the virtual machine and its corresponding SQL database to a secondary array. The snapshot schedule determines when data is transferred to the secondary array unless using synchronous replication or when replicating the active snapshot asynchronously. 1.
2 Host availability Since the Data Collector services need to remain highly available, the hypervisor can be used to provide additional protections for greater uptime. 2.1 VMware When running the Data Collector virtual machine on VMware vSphere, there are several key features that can protect the virtual machine. 2.1.1 vMotion The VMware vSphere vMotion® feature allows the virtual machines to be migrated between physical hosts, and is an important piece to provide proactive uptime.
2.2.2 Microsoft Hyper-V with failover clustering When using Hyper-V, if a host fails, the virtual machines will be restarted on another host in the cluster, limiting downtime to how long the VMs take to reboot on another node in the cluster. 2.2.3 Live Migration Microsoft Hyper-V Live Migration also can provide the important role of being able to proactively move the virtual machines to another node in the cluster for maintenance.
3 Conclusion With the help of hypervisor technologies, Dell Storage Manager can be configured such that it can achieve very high availability. For more detailed technical information about the various technologies discussed in this paper, refer to the related best practices guides at Dell.com/StorageResources.
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