Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) provides PowerMax customers with the industry gold standard for remote data replication, enabling minimal recovery point objectives (RPOs) for synchronous replication and minimal recovery time objectives (RTOs) for Metro replications. With outstanding high availability, SRDF Asynchronous modes provide consistent restartable images when longer distances between replicated sites are involved.
The main components of an SRDF setup are:
- Storage group—The storage group can be and usually is the same storage group used for provisioning storage volumes to your application. In some cases, a different storage group is used.
- SRDF ports—These ports are physical ports on the arrays used for replicating data. These ports are referred to as RF (RDF over Fibre Channel) or RE (RDF over Ethernet).
- RDFG—The RDFG or SRDF group is a grouping of SRDF ports and devices replicated between two PowerMax or VMAX storage arrays. SRDF groups are created on demand by the API when required. The SRDF Protection API algorithm creates an RDFG for every SRDF/A or Metro protected storage group and picks the least loaded SRDF group for SRDF/S and Adaptive Copy replication sessions.
To use Ansible to manage SRDF, an initial connection must exist between storage arrays where replication will take place. This initial connection is set up either through the Unisphere UI or REST API using the list remote ports and create SRDF group calls.
The Ansible collection for PowerMax provides control over the setup and control of SRDF pairing and managing the state of SRDF connections. The collection includes the following modules, which are used for managing and gathering information about SRDF environments with Ansible:
- Srdf—Includes functionality for creating an SRDF pair for a storage group, modifying the SRDF mode, modifying the SRDF state of an existing SRDF pair, and deleting an SRDF pair. All create and modify calls are asynchronous by default.
- Rdfgroup—Gets details of an RDF group from a specified PowerMax/VMAX storage system. It lists the volumes of an RDF group from a specified PowerMax/VMAX storage system.
- Metrodr—Sets up and manages a metro DR environment on a PowerMax storage system. It includes getting details of a metro DR environment, creating a metro DR environment, converting an existing storage group into a metro DR environment, modifying metro DR environment attributes, and deleting a metro DR environment.