Home > Storage > PowerMax and VMAX > Storage Admin > Implementing Dell SRDF SRA with VMware SRM > Failover with non-VMware devices
In most environments, not all applications have been virtualized for one reason or another. Consequently, there are environments that have a mixture of virtual and physical servers, and many of which have dependencies across their hosted applications regardless of the fact that they have different underlying server architectures.
Consequently, during a disaster recovery operation, devices that are not presented to the VMware environment may need to be failed over with the VMware devices atomically. Unfortunately, SRM does not have a built-in mechanism for including replicated devices that are not presented to the VMware environments. SRM will exclude them in datastore groups if they do not host VMFS volumes or are in use as Raw Device Mappings. Nevertheless, there is a way to bypass SRM to have the SRA control devices that are not presented in the environment.
SRDF/Star setup requires creation of consistency groups and all devices in those groups will be controlled by any SRDF/Star operations. SRDF/Star does not allow operations on a subset of devices in the SRDF/Star group, so whatever devices are present in the SRDF/Star group, those devices will be failed over by the SRA during recovery.
In order for this to work for SRDF/Non-Star there are a few requirements:
If these requirements are met, the SRA will failover both the VMware devices and the non-VMware devices during a recovery operation. Besides adding the devices to the device/composite group no other special operations are required of the user besides the normal recovery operations.
If the recovery operation is going to make use of the gold copy functionality discussed in Chapter 5, the non-VMware devices and the respective TimeFinder target devices must also be added to the gold copy device pairing files.
It is important to note that the non-VMware devices will not be controlled in anyway by the SRA once they are read/write enabled. Since they are not in the VMware environment, neither SRM or the SRA have any method of presenting them to a host. Therefore, the user must perform whatever functions are necessary for the non-VMware hosts to be able to mount the R2 copies the SRA read/write enabled. If the virtual machines depend on the non-VMware applications to be running before they can power on, it would be advisable to add a pause/script into the recovery plan before SRM powers on the virtual machines so steps can be taken by the administrator or the script to prepare the non-VMware applications.
Note: Dell does not recommend enabling RdfDeviceMaskingControl when the SRA is configured to manage non-VMware devices. The SRDF SRA requires that all devices be configured in the masking control file and since the SRA cannot distinguish between VMware and non-VMware devices, the SRA will then attempt to present the non-VMware devices to the recovery cluster. Consequently, users should disable automated masking control and manually present devices prior to recovery.