Home > Storage > PowerStore > Data Protection > Dell PowerStore: Metro Volume > Introduction
A Metro Volume provides synchronous replication of spanned block storage volumes or volume groups across two PowerStore clusters in metro distance. When enabled, this feature allows an operator to configure fully active-active Metro Volumes across two PowerStore clusters running PowerStoreOS 3.0 or later. The stretched architecture allows workload mobility and cross-site automated load balancing.
When a Metro Volume is fully synchronized, it provides concurrent host read and write access to the same Metro Volume on both participating PowerStore clusters. An embedded polarization mechanism protects against a split-brain situation during a failure scenario. After the failure has been corrected, PowerStore starts a self-healing process to turn the Metro Volume back into an active-active state.
The PowerStoreOS 3.0 release supports configuring Metro Volume with standard volumes only. PowerStoreOS 4.0 adds support for configuring Metro Volume on volume groups.
The Metro Volume feature uses the common remote-system configuration for replication management and replication data traffic through an Ethernet (LAN) connection. The following sections show the configuration in PowerStore Manager, although using the PowerStore CLI and REST API are also supported. The following subsections discuss these topics:
This section describes PowerStore native block Metro Volume support in a vSphere Metro Storage Cluster architecture (vMSC).
A vMSC provides fully active and workload balanced data centers with resources in a stretched vSphere cluster. The stretched cluster infrastructure can be in same data center, or even across site borders in two different sites in metro distance. Metro Volume configuration provides disaster and downtime avoidance with vSphere High Availability (HA). For more information about high availability and disaster recovery in a vMSC configuration, see VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC).
PowerStoreOS 4.0 extends Metro Volume support to Microsoft Windows Server and Linux. For more information about Microsoft, see Metro Volume support for Microsoft. For more information about Linux, see Metro Volume support for Linux.