- Download the Dell PowerFlex SRA from VMware as covered in the PowerFlex SRA section.
- Verify that there is an RCG with at least one volume pair on the PowerFlex clusters. There should also be a datastore for each device and at least one VM on each datastore. This is necessary to create protection groups and recovery plans within VMware SRM.
Note: Dell Technologies recommends using a custom System name for the PowerFlex cluster rather than the default, generated one.
- Extract the Dell PowerFlex SRA compressed tar file from the downloaded zip:
Dell_EMC_PowerFlex_SRA_1.0.0.1.tar.gz
- Go to the protection site SRM Appliance Management UI at: https://<SRM FQDN>:5480. The Welcome to VMware Appliance Management dialog box appears as shown in Figure 33.
Figure 33. SRM Appliance Management screen
- Enter the credentials (default administrator user is ‘admin’), and select LOG IN.
- In the SRM Appliance Management dialog box, navigate to Storage Replication Adapters in the bottom left panel. Next, select NEW ADAPTER in the top right as shown in Figure 34.
Figure 34. SRM Storage Replication Adapters - New Adapter
- In the New Adapter dialog box shown in Figure 35, select UPLOAD and navigate to the file Dell_EMC_PowerFlex_SRA_1.0.0.1.tar.gz. The file immediately begins uploading. Figure 36 shows the progression.
Figure 35. Upload new adapter
Figure 36. Successful upload
- Repeat steps 1 through 7 for the recovery site.
The following procedure describes configuring Dell PowerFlex SRA certificates for the Photon operating system.
Before adding the PowerFlex clusters in SRM, an additional configuration step is required. The root certificate of each PowerFlex cluster must be uploaded to its respective SRA. This certificate can be the same one used when replication was configured between the two PowerFlex clusters, or it can be extracted again. The following steps walk through the process. It must be completed for each SRA.
- Obtain the root certificate, in PEM format, of the PowerFlex cluster. If there is no generated certificate, it can be exported from the primary MDM instance using CLI. Note that the name of the certificate file is user-defined. The login syntax for PowerFlex 4 requires the extra variable, management_system_ip.
scli --login --username admin --password <password> [management_system_ip <IP of PowerFlex GUI]
scli --extract_root_ca --certificate_file /tmp/root_ca.pem
- After obtaining the certificates for each cluster, log back into either SRM Appliance Management instance or navigate to Storage Replication Adapters again. It does not matter which site, protection, or recovery, is modified first.
Figure 37. SRA screen in SRM Appliance Management
- Select the three dots in the corner of the Dell EMC PowerFlex SRA Plugin box as shown in Figure 38 and choose the menu Download configuration archive. This initiates a download of the SRA configuration files in the form of the file sra_powerflex~latest.tar.gz.
Figure 38. Download SRA archive
- Using 7-Zip (or another extract utility) as in this example, extract the archive zipped file and the tar file within it. There are two files: config.ini and sra-configuration-version.txt as shown in Figure 39.
Figure 39. Contents of archive
- Copy the root certificate of the appropriate PowerFlex cluster into the same directory. In this example shown in Figure 40, the certificate is root_ca.pem.
Figure 40. Copy over the root certificate
- As shown in Figure 41, edit the config.ini file with Notepad or a simple text editor. Do not use Microsoft Word to avoid adding extra characters. Once open, look for the variable ca_path = under the [ssl] section.
Figure 41. Config.ini before editing
- Edit the config.ini by typing the name of the root certificate and then save the file as shown in Figure 42. The name must match the name given in the certificate. If wanted, alter the variable verify to True.
Figure 42. Config.ini after editing
- The three files can now be repacked. Following are the steps using 7-Zip.
- Right-click the files and select 7-Zip -> Add to archive… as shown in Figure 43.
Figure 43. Create a compressed archive - step 1
- Provide a name for the file with .tar suffix and set the Archive format to tar as shown in Figure 44.
Figure 44. Create a compressed archive - step 2
- Next, as shown in Figure 45, right-click the newly created tar file, in this example dsib2227.tar, and again choose Add to archive…
Figure 45. Create a compressed archive - step 3
- Enter a name for the file with .tar.gz suffix and set the Archive format to gzip as shown in Figure 46.
Figure 46. Create a compressed archive - step 4
- Now upload the file to the SRA. Using the same process as downloading, select the three buttons and choose Upload configuration archive as shown in Figure 47.
Figure 47. Upload configuration archive menu option
- Provide the file and select UPLOAD. Another green box appears to indicate the success as shown in Figure 48.
Figure 48. Upload configuration archive
For advanced configurations, see the Dell PowerFlex Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) Plugin for VMware Site Recovery Manager Release Notes.