Home > Storage > PowerMax and VMAX > Storage Admin > Dell PowerMax: Ansible Modules Best Practices > Setting up two-site SRDF with Ansible
A common configuration for many customers is to have data protected between two sites, enabling the ability to failover workloads to another data center if a disaster or outage occurs at the primary site. Figure 35 shows an example of this configuration. The srdf module enables customers to set up this type of configuration to protect storage volumes with Ansible. Additional control of the environment is also possible, enabling customers to create and run playbooks to failover, failback, suspend, and split the replication environments for testing and disaster recovery purposes.
Protecting an existing storage group requires a single task in a playbook, with the following parameter inputs:
A sample playbook is detailed here. Figure 36 shows a sample task to protect a storage group with asynchronous replication.
Best Practice: To ensure successful pairing of SRDF devices using Ansible, ensure that at least one RDFG already exists between PowerMax arrays. Ansible modules will create SRDF pairings and a storage group with the same name as the source on the remote array. If a storage group of the same name already exists on the remote array, an error condition that must be resolved outside of Ansible could occur. SRDF pairing will still be created. If you have a task in a playbook that depends on your SRDF protection already being in place, ensure that wait_for_completion is set to true. Examples of such a task include taking a snapshot at the remote site or creating a masking view on the remote site for SRDF metro configurations.