Home > Storage > PowerMax and VMAX > Storage Admin > Implementing Dell SRDF SRA with VMware SRM > Test failover Advanced Options
The following options are available in the EmcSrdfSraGlobalOptions.xml file and provide advanced capabilities when running test failover. Most parameters will be explained in detail in this section.
The following sections will discuss the first four options and when/how they should be used. Options 6 and 7 are discussed in TimeFinder/SnapVX overview and option 8 is discussed in section Masking Control configuration.
Even as pervasive as server virtualization has become, many environments still host a mixture of virtual and physical servers. Furthermore, these servers have dependencies between their hosted applications without regard to underlying server architecture thereby creating relationships that traverse the boundaries between the virtual and physical realms. Consequently, during a disaster recovery test, enterprise consistent copies of application data across physical servers and virtual machines may be required in order for the test to be a true success.
The default behavior of the SRA does not allow for this to happen. If the customers have consistently activated the R2 and replica devices for the physical and virtual environment themselves the SRA will incrementally re-create the VMware-related devices and then activate them again during test failover. Therefore, the VMware replica devices, while still internally consistent, will no longer be consistent with the devices external to VMware.
Therefore the SRDF SRA offers behavior to accept the already activated state of the VMware replica devices. In order to address this need, the global option “IgnoreActivatedSnapshots” is available in the config file “EmcSrdfSraGlobalOptions.xml”. The default value of this option will be “No”. If set to “Yes”, the SRA will use the existing VMware-related replicas along with any external devices during a test failover operation within SRM. The SRA will ignore the already activated devices and report success.
The SRDF SRA still requires a correctly configured “EmcSrdfSraTestFailoverConfig.xml” file in order to perform the test operation. This configuration file contains information such as “ArrayId”, “CopyType” and “DevicePairs”. The device pair source corresponds to each of the “R2” devices contained in the consistency group that is being test failed over. The device pair target represents the device on which the user wants to take the snapshots of the R2 devices.
The information in the aforementioned options file is critical for SRA in order to perform the test operation. SRA returns results to SRM with these snapshot device names along with their respective WWNs. This enables SRM to mount the datastores and boot VMs from the target devices reported in the SRA response.
In order to have the SRDF SRA work in this specific scenario, one of the two requirements must be met.
In the first scenario, the user is responsible to create/activate the TimeFinder session for the TimeFinder pairs prior to performing the “Test” operation. If they do not, the SRA will only perform a create/activate on the VMware devices and not the external ones since they are not in the device group. If the user re-creates the TimeFinder targets before the “Cleanup” operation (and the IgnoreActivatedSnapshots is still enabled) the SRA will ignore the already re-created devices and report success. In the second scenario the SRA will create/activate the VMware and non-VMware devices during the test operation so user intervention is not required in this circumstance.
Note: IgnoreActivatedSnapshots is also supported with TestFailoverWithoutLocalSnapshots. Discussion on the interaction of these two features will be discussed later in this chapter in the section entitled, Test failover without TimeFinder. This section discusses the advanced option TestFailoverWithoutLocalSnapshots in detail and is required knowledge to fully understand how this interaction behaves.