Short articles related to Data Protection.
RecoverPoint for VMs Deployment Automation – How to Deploy Complete RP4VMs Systems in Minutes
Wed, 21 Sep 2022 22:02:31 -0000
|Read Time: 0 minutes
I’m a firm believer in automating EVERYTHING, so in this blog we are going to show how we automate just about everything in RecoverPoint for VMs 😊.
In RP4VMs land, we have VM protection automation solutions, per-tag and per-cluster protection, use-case driven tasks, and so on. And now, I’m honored to present you a complete deployment automation solution.
So, first things first, what does it do?
It’s a Python-based script that operates with the RecoverPoint for VMs Deployment REST API and vCenter.
In terms of requirements, the following list should help:
The script accepts one mandatory parameter -configfile or --config-file and two optional parameters: (1) pluginserver and (2) connect to prevent configuration of the plugin server and to skip connection to other clusters accordingly.
Here is the full script syntax:
# python rp4vms_deploy.py -h
Usage: rp4vms_deploy.py [-h] -configfile CONFIGFILE [-pluginserver] [-connect] Script to automate RP4VMs deployment options: -h, --help show this help message and exit -configfile CONFIGFILE, --config-file CONFIGFILE Full path to the JSON config file -pluginserver, --config-plugin-server Optionally prevents Plugin Server configuration -connect, --connect-another-cluster Optionally prevents connection to a different cluster
I might be biased but there are so many cases where this solution can come in handy. Let’s look at some common use cases:
In this case, we would run the script twice in the following manner:
a) Deploying the first cluster:
# python rp4vms_deploy.py -configfile clusterA_config.json -connect
b) Deploying the second cluster including cluster connect:
# python rp4vms_deploy.py -configfile clusterB_config.json
2. Adding a new cluster to an existing system:
# python rp4vms_deploy.py -configfile cluster_config.json
3. Scale out – adding new clusters to a separate system on the same vCenter and plugin server:
a) Deploying the first cluster:
# python rp4vms_deploy.py -configfile clusterA_config.json -pluginserver -connect
b) Deploying the second cluster including cluster connect:
# python rp4vms_deploy.py -configfile clusterB_config.json -pluginserver
# python rp4vms_deploy.py -configfile config.json -> Provisioning Plugin Server from OVA Opening OVA source: C:\Users\idan\Downloads\RecoverPoint-PluginServer_v5.3.3_282.ova Opening VI target: vi://Administrator%40vsphere.local@10.0.0.10:443/Hopkinton/host/Hop_HA1/ Deploying to VI: vi://Administrator%40vsphere.local@10.0.0.10:443/Hopkinton/host/Hop_HA1/ Transfer Completed Powering on VM: Manchester_Plugin-Server Task Completed Completed successfully ---> OVA deployment completed successfully -> Provisioning vRPA1 from OVA Opening OVA source: C:\Users\idan\Downloads\EMC_RecoverPoint_vRPA-RP4VMs_rel5.3.SP3_m.348.ova Opening VI target: vi://Administrator%40vsphere.local@10.0.0.10:443/Hopkinton/host/Hop_HA1/ Deploying to VI: vi://Administrator%40vsphere.local@10.0.0.10:443/Hopkinton/host/Hop_HA1/ Transfer Completed Powering on VM: Manchester_vRPA1 Task Completed Completed successfully ---> OVA deployment completed successfully -> Provisioning vRPA2 from OVA Opening OVA source: C:\Users\idan\Downloads\EMC_RecoverPoint_vRPA-RP4VMs_rel5.3.SP3_m.348.ova Opening VI target: vi://Administrator%40vsphere.local@10.0.0.10:443/Hopkinton/host/Hop_HA1/ Deploying to VI: vi://Administrator%40vsphere.local@10.0.0.10:443/Hopkinton/host/Hop_HA1/ Transfer Completed Powering on VM: Manchester_vRPA2 Task Completed Completed successfully ---> OVA deployment completed successfully -> Checking connectivity to vRPAs ---> vRPA Mgmt IP 10.247.8.118 is reachable ---> vRPA Mgmt IP 10.247.8.119 is reachable ---> All vRPAs are reachable -> Running deployment pre-validation checks ---> Transaction LOCAL_1 RUNNING 0% ---> Pre-installation validation passed successfully -> Timezone detected: Europe/London -> Searching for available vRPAs ---> Transaction LOCAL_2 RUNNING 0% ---> Transaction LOCAL_2 RUNNING 50% ---> Transaction LOCAL_2 RUNNING 50% ---> Transaction LOCAL_2 RUNNING 50% -> DS for Repository Volume detected -> Mgmt Network detected -> Building deployment configuration -> Deploying RP4VMs cluster ---> Transaction DEPLOY_3 RUNNING 0% ---> Transaction DEPLOY_3 RUNNING 52% ---> Transaction DEPLOY_3 RUNNING 52% ---> Transaction DEPLOY_3 RUNNING 52% ---> Transaction DEPLOY_3 RUNNING 53% ---> Transaction DEPLOY_3 RUNNING 53% ---> Transaction DEPLOY_3 RUNNING 84% ---> Transaction DEPLOY_3 RUNNING 84% ---> Transaction DEPLOY_3 RUNNING 84% ---> Transaction DEPLOY_3 RUNNING 84% -> Cluster deployed successfully -> Checking connectivity to cluster Mgmt IP ---> vRPA Cluster is reachable -> Checking connectivity to Plugin Server ---> Plugin Server is reachable -> Configuring Plugin Server -> Plugin Server configured successfully -> Running connectivity checks to peer cluster ---> Transaction LOCAL_28 RUNNING 0% ---> Transaction LOCAL_28 RUNNING 14% ---> Transaction LOCAL_28 RUNNING 44% ---> Transaction LOCAL_28 RUNNING 48% ---> Transaction LOCAL_28 RUNNING 52% ---> Transaction LOCAL_28 RUNNING 84% ---> Connectivity checks to peer cluster completed successfully -> Connecting clusters ---> Transaction LOCAL_29 RUNNING 0% ---> Transaction LOCAL_29 RUNNING 51% ---> Transaction LOCAL_29 RUNNING 51% ---> Clusters Connect completed successfully -> All tasks completed successfully
The script and the config file can be found at GitHub:
https://github.com/IdanKen/Dell-EMC-RecoverPoint4VMs
You are more than welcome to file an issue in GitHub or reach out to me via email:
Idan.kentor@dell.com
Thanks for reading!
Idan
Author: Idan Kentor
How Dell Technologies Simplifies Data Protection
Thu, 04 Aug 2022 19:31:34 -0000
|Read Time: 0 minutes
As we are moving to the era of digitalization, more data is vulnerable to corruption, compromise, and loss. As a result, organizations are focusing on data protection strategies to improve security and data integrity. The key principle of data protection is to safeguard and make data available under all circumstances. Dell Technologies offers a variety of data protection products to make sure that data is secure and readily available. In this blog I’ll be covering a few of the outstanding data protection products that Dell provides.
As organizations are redistributing and extending their data to the cloud or to multiple clouds, protecting that data becomes critical. By implementing a multi-cloud data protection solution, users and developers can avoid cloud vendor lock-in by keeping data independent of the cloud, to reduce worry about high egress charges, migration risk, or time required to move data. Multi-Cloud Data Services for Dell PowerProtect, enabled by Faction, supports a data centric approach for users, allowing them to separate their data and cloud management strategies across public cloud providers. Multi-Cloud Data Services for Dell PowerProtect is a fully managed service that provides a single target for backup and recovery for AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud.
Data protection solutions from Dell Technologies gives customers the power to confidently plan their modern data protection strategies through constant innovation, agile engineering, and tight integration with VMware - all at a lower cost of ownership (TCO). Dell offers protection solutions for VMs, applications, and Kubernetes for a single platform for containerized products and workloads. The solution simplifies deployment and management of VMware workloads on-premises or in one or more public clouds.
PowerProtect Cyber Recovery provides proven, modern, and intelligent protection to isolate critical data, identify suspicious activity, and accelerate data recovery, allowing you to resume normal business operations with confidence in case of a cyberattack. Critical data is stored immutably in a hardened vault, enabling recovery with assured data availability, integrity, and confidentiality. CyberSense is the analytics engine that is integrated with Cyber Recovery to help find data corruption when an attack penetrates the data center. CyberSense enables confident recovery of good data and offers insight into attack vectors from within the Cyber Recovery vault.
DD series is our purpose built backup target appliance. The DD operating system (DDOS) provides inline deduplication for data protection and disaster recovery (DR) in the environment. DDOS is the intelligence that powers DD series and PowerProtect systems. It provides the agility, security, and reliability that enables the platform to deliver scalable, high-speed and cloud-enabled protection storage for backup and archive. DD series appliances vary in storage capacity and data throughput. PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition (DDVE) is the software-defined version of the DD series: a virtual deduplication appliance that provides data protection for small-to-medium sized business, enterprise and service provider environments both on-prem and in-cloud.
DP series is an integrated appliance solution thatprovides complete backup, replication, recovery, deduplication, instant access and restore, search & analytics, seamless VMware integration — plus, cloud readiness with disaster recovery (DR) and long-term retention (LTR) to the cloud — all in a single appliance. With the DP series, customers reduce their time-to-protect and become more agile with a reliable solution that’s fast, protected more efficiently, and can be recovered quickly.
PowerProtect Data Manager software protects data and delivers governance control for modern cloud workloads across your evolving physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Address ever-changing growth and IT complexity by leveraging Dell software defined data protection platforms. PowerProtect Data Manager delivers next generation data protection that enables faster IT transformation, while giving you the assurance that you can easily safeguard and quickly unlock your data’s value. This software-defined solution includes self-service protection, centralized governance, and SaaS-based reporting and monitoring.
Avamar is backup and recovery software that provides integrated data deduplication technology. Avamar solves the challenges that are associated with traditional data protection, enabling fast and reliable backup and recovery for remote offices, VMware environments, DD series and Cloud Tier, and data center LANs. Unlike traditional solutions, Avamar reduces the size of backup data at the source—before it transfers across the network and stores to disk. As a result, Avamar delivers fast, efficient daily full backups despite slow or congested infrastructure, and data encryption for added security.
Avamar is available as a virtual edition or as a component of Data Protection Suite, which offers you a complete suite of data protection software options.
NetWorker software provides unified backup and recovery of enterprise applications and databases. With centralized administration, NetWorker helps you take advantage of the data protection that fits your needs best: deduplication, backup to disk and tape, snapshots, replication, and NAS. NetWorker protects both physical and virtual environments including VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. It provides the same enterprise-level experience, whether you are protecting data and applications within the data center or in the public cloud.
NetWorker is available as virtual edition (NVE) or as a component of the Data Protection Suite, which offers you a complete suite of data protection software options.
Data Protection Advisor allows you to unify and automate monitoring, alerting, and reporting across your data protection software and storage environments, including on-premises and cloud. Data Protection Advisor enables you to make informed decisions faster, to increase efficiency.
RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines enables quick recovery of VMware virtual machines to any point in time. RecoverPoint for VMs provides continuous data protection (CDP) for operational recovery and disaster recovery. It is hypervisor-based, software-only data replication that integrates with VMware vCenter.
APEX Backup Services is a cloud-based data protection solution that ensures predictable, controllable costs without increasing complexity. It deploys in minutes and provides unlimited on-demand scaling to ensure that growing data volumes are always protected. An intuitive web-based experience provides centralized visibility and management across workloads and users, to ensure that your data is always protected.
With changing times, data protection solutions provided by Dell have also changed, and for the better. The variety of data protection products provided by Dell Technologies makes sure that data is easy to access, readily available, secured, and uncorrupted.
For more details, see the following resources:
Author: Charu, Engineering Technologist 2