Deploying Dell EMC SRDF/Metro Smart DR with Microsoft SQL Server for Physical and Virtual Environments

Executive summary

Audience

The problem with failover solutions

Benefits of Microsoft failover clusters and high availability (HA)

Dell EMC SRDF/Metro simplifies Microsoft failover cluster deployment

The interaction between SRDF/Metro and Windows failover cluster

SRDF/Metro performance benefits in Microsoft SQL Server failover cluster environments

SRDF/Metro protection from a “split-brain” situation

SRDF/Metro Smart DR

SRDF/Metro deployment with Microsoft failover cluster

Lab environment hardware and software configuration

SRDF/Metro HA Setup

Step 1: Prerequisites

Step 2: Create an SRDF connection between the storage systems

Step 3: Set up Witness and establish the connection to vWitness

Step 4: Determine which storage groups to protect

Step 5: Create empty SRDF groups with labels

Step 6: Option 1 (not recommended): set up protection using “Bias”

Step 6: Option 2 (recommended): setup protection using “Witness”

Step 7: Masking views creation

Adding SRDF/Metro Smart DR protection to an existing SRDF/Metro configuration

Step 1: Determine the Storage Groups to protect with SRDF/A

Step 2: Create empty SRDF/A groups from the R1 and R2 side

Step 3: Add Smart DR protection from the R1 side

Step 4: Add Smart DR protection to SRDF/Metro storage group

Creating SRDF/Metro and Smart DR protection at the same time

Step 1: Set up SRDF/Metro and Smart DR on existing storage group

Step 2: Review summary and progress of Smart DR setup and storage group status

Setting up Microsoft failover cluster with SRDF/Metro

Step 1: Format the disk resources on a node and add them to cluster

Step 2: Customize cluster disks or convert them to CSVs

Step 3: Set up SQL Server failover cluster

Step 4: Update the dependencies for other shared disks if not using CSVs

PowerMax SRDF/Metro and Microsoft SQL Server failover cluster tests

Hardware and software components

Test Case 1: Moving a shared disk resource to another node

Test Case 2: Moving entire SQL Server role to another node

SQL Server high availability results summary

Summary

References

Appendix: Microsoft failover cluster on VMware SRDF/Metro Storage Cluster with PowerMax SRDF/Metro

Step 1: Set up and run the ESXi HA cluster

Step 2: Configure VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)

Step 3: Configure VMware HA

Step 4: Configure Host and VM groups for SRDF/Metro based failover

Step 5: Configure Host rules

Step 6: Configure Data Store on SRDF/Metro devices

Step 7: Enable cluster on the data stores

Step 8: Create VM and edit SCSI controller settings

Step 9: Create VMDKs and assign them to the VM

Step 10: Create VM on remote side and use the above existing VMDKs

Step 11: Configure Windows failover cluster and SQL Server failover cluster on these VMs