A Best Practice for Enhancing Your Dell PowerVault Storage Investment with Dell Metro Node
Thu, 28 Sep 2023 19:37:34 -0000
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Dell PowerVault ME5 storage provides industry-leading features, capacity, and performance, at entry-level prices. But did you know that the Dell Technologies storage portfolio also offers an easy-to-use, cost-effective way to enhance the business continuity configuration of your PowerVault investment? It’s done with Dell metro node.
All organizations – large and small – need to make business continuity a high priority to protect their data and ensure uptime. With metro node, your PowerVault environment can take advantage of enterprise-class features, such as:
- Synchronous replication
- Automatic DR failover with a decision time objective (DTO) of zero
- Seamless data mobility to other Dell PowerVault or Dell PowerStore storage appliances
- Nondisruptive tech upgrades and refreshes
To learn more, check out this new whitepaper: Dell PowerVault and Metro Node with Microsoft.
Conclusion
If you are already using PowerVault storage or are considering PowerVault, explore the power of metro node features and see where metro node can enhance and extend the resiliency of your PowerVault storage investment.
Resources
- Dell PowerVault Storage Info hub
- Dell PowerVault and Metro Node with Microsoft
- Dell Metro Node Product Guide
Author: Marty Glaser, Sr. Principal Engineer
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Time to Rethink your SQL Backup Strategy – Part 2
Wed, 10 May 2023 15:17:38 -0000
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A while back, I wrote a blog about changes to backup/restore functionality in SQL Server 2022: SQL Server 2022 – Time to Rethink your Backup and Recovery Strategy. Now, more exciting features are here in PowerStoreOS 3.5 that provide additional options and enhanced flexibility for protecting, migrating, and recovering SQL Server workloads on PowerStore.
Secure your snapshots
Backup copies provide zero value if they have been compromised when you need them the most. Snapshot removal could happen accidentally or intentionally as part of a malicious attack. PowerStoreOS 3.5 introduces a new feature, secure snapshot, to ensure that snapshots can't be deleted prior to their expiration date. This feature is a simple checkbox on a snapshot or protection policy that protects snapshots until they expire and can't be turned off. This ensures that your critical data will be available when you need it. Secure snapshot can be enabled on new or existing snapshots. Here’s an example of the secure snapshot option on an existing snapshot.
Once this option is selected, a warning is displayed stating that the snapshot can’t be deleted until the retention period expires. To make the snapshot secure, ensure that the Secure Snapshot checkbox is selected and click Apply.
Secure snapshot can be applied to individual snapshots of volumes or volume groups. The secure snapshot option can also be enabled on one or more snapshot rules in a protection policy to ensure that snapshots taken as part of the protection policy have secure snapshot applied.
Since existing snapshots can be marked as secure, this option can be used on snapshots taken outside of PowerStore Manager or even snapshots taken with other utilities such as AppSync. Consider enabling this option on your critical snapshots to ensure that they are available when you need them!
There's no such thing as too many backups!
If you're responsible for managing and protecting SQL Server databases, you quickly learn that it's valuable to have many different backups and in various formats, for various reasons. It could be for disaster recovery, migration, reporting, troubleshooting, resetting dev/test environments, or any combination of these. Perhaps you’re trying to mitigate the risk of failure of a single platform, method, or tool. Each scenario and workflow has different requirements. PowerStoreOS 3.5 introduces direct integration with Dell PowerProtect DD series appliances, including PowerProtect DDVE which is the virtual edition for both on-premises and cloud deployments. This provides an agentless way to take crash consistent, off-array backups directly from PowerStore and send them to PowerProtect DD.
To enable PowerStore remote backup, you need to connect the PowerProtect DD appliance to your PowerStore system as a remote system.
Next, you add a remote backup rule to a new or existing protection policy for the volume or volume group you want to protect, providing the destination, schedule, and retention.
Once a protection policy is created with remote backup rules and assigned to a PowerStore volume or volume group, a backup session will appear.
Under Backup Sessions, you can see the status of all the sessions or select one to back up immediately, and click Backup.
Once a remote backup is taken, it will appear under the Volume or Volume Group Protection tab as a remote snapshot.
From here, you can retrieve it and work with it as a normal snapshot on PowerStore or enable Instant Access whereby the contents can be accessed by a host directly from PowerProtect DD. You can even retrieve remote snapshots from other PowerStore clusters!
This is yet another powerful tool included with PowerStoreOS 3.5 to enhance data protection and data mobility workflows.
For more information on this feature and other new PowerStore features and capabilities, be sure to check out all the latest information on the Dell PowerStore InfoHub page.
Author: Doug Bernhardt
Sr. Principal Engineering Technologist
https://www.linkedin.com/in/doug-bernhardt-data/
VMware Virtual Machine Recovery with Dell PowerVault ME5 Snapshots
Wed, 10 May 2023 00:05:43 -0000
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Overview
Dell PowerVault ME5 storage platforms are well suited to support VMware workloads and simplify operations.
This blog highlights leveraging PowerVault native snapshots to recover virtual machines (VMs) in case of disaster or outage. The ME5 storage system can create multiple point-in-time snapshots of virtual volumes and these snapshots are treated like any other volume. The snapshots are read-writable when mounted to hosts.
How-To
Our source volume me5_ds1 is mounted on ESXi host s1244.
The datastore me5_ds1 is in vCenter, with the “VSI-Test02” VM.
To begin the snap process, log in to the ME5 GUI and start by adding data protection to the volume: Select Volumes > volume actions.
Once the volume is selected, configure the data protection type. In this scenario we are using local snapshots.
Select the option to create the snapshot immediately.
Review the Summary of the snapshot configuration.
Under the source volume me5_ds1, we now see that the snapshot is created.
View the properties of the snapshot.
In vCenter, let us simulate a failure by unmounting the source volume and removing the VM from inventory.
Next, we will mount the snapshot to the ESXi hosts. Select Snapshot > Volume Action > Mount Host.
From vCenter, add the snapshot volume to the host. Right-click Host and select Storage > Add Datastore.
.
We want to re-signature the snapshot to create a unique UUID.
Now the snapshot is mounted as a datastore.
To recover the VM, right-click the snapshot datastore and select Register VM.
Select the folder and select the vmx file.
After selecting and restoring the vmx file, the VM is running inside the snapshot datastore. At this point, we can storage vmotion this machine back to production storage.
Conclusion
Dell PowerVault ME5 is the new gold standard for entry-level storage, with blazing speed, high-capacity limits, and simplicity. PowerVault integrates seamlessly with VMware by delivering a platform that is secure, cost effective, and easily managed.