HP StorageWorks Storage Mirroring Virtual Infrastructure user's guide (T2558-96095, April 2008)

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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 SMVI 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 includes support for 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