Home > Storage > PowerMax and VMAX > Storage Admin > Dell PowerMax and VMware vSphere Configuration Guide > Cloning at disaster protection site with vSphere
Many Dell customers employ a disaster recovery site for their VMware environments. Many also wish to take advantage of this hardware if it is idle, utilizing it as perhaps a test or development environment. They do not, however, wish to compromise their acceptable data loss, or Recovery Point Objective (RPO). In order to accomplish this, TimeFinder software can be used in conjunction with SRDF to create point-in-time copies of the production data on the disaster recovery site. This is accomplished with no downtime or risk to the production data.
This section explains how to use TimeFinder copies of the remotely replicated production volumes and present them to a VMware environment without impacting the RPO of the production environment.
Note: The procedures included in this section do not address solutions that leverage VMware’s vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM). For information on using Dell PowerMax with SRM, consult the Using EMC SRDF Adapter for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager whitepaper and Implementing Dell EMC SRDF SRA with VMware SRM.
Creating copies of volumes with TimeFinder software is covered in Copying virtual machines with TimeFinder and, therefore, it will not be repeated here. In particular, as this section is concerned with production environments, Using TimeFinder/SnapVX with hot virtual machines should be consulted. That section details the use of Dell Consistency technology which ensures that the point-in-time copy of the volumes is in a dependent-write consistent data state and the virtual machine in the datastore are restartable.
In addition, the assumption is made that the system administrator has mapped and masked all devices to the ESXi host(s) involved in this process. This means that the R2 remote devices and any SnapVX targets are seen by the ESXi host. If additional information is required on this procedure, see Adding and removing Dell PowerMax devices to VMware ESXi hosts.