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July 9th, 2019 06:00
Testing Equallogic SAN restore
I have an old PS4100 SAN replicating to a secondary DC.
The SAN contains 7 ESX datastores, they are all replicated and I have been asked to test a restore.
Looking in EqualLogic group Manager in the Inbound Replicas list on the target SAN, I only see the option to promote replica sets to volume.
I need to set a replica online at the target site, there is an ESX cluster there that has iSCSI connectivity to the SAN so I can mount the volume using CHAP authentication.
Is the procedure outlined somewhere?
Is it a matter of promoting to volume a replica set, mount the volume in ESX and then import VMs? Once I am done with the restore test what should I do with volume?
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dwilliam62
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1.5K Posts
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July 9th, 2019 07:00
Hello,
The process is not documented. But if you have enough space you can clone a replica and bring that online. Otherwise you will need to PAUSE replication and promote a replica instead.
Then you can set the ACL to whatever you wish. Then point the ESX server at the DR Group IP. Then rescan to login that replica volume.
Then you can do "Add storage" to resignature the VMFS Datastore. If you don't do that you won't see the Datastore. After resignature it will then show as 'snapshot-OLD-UUID-DatastoreName' You can then browse, register a VM or VMs and run your test.
When you are done you want to un-register the VMs. Unmount the Datastore in ESXi.
On the EQL Dr site put the clone OFFLINE.
Then on ESXi side do a rescan again.
Now you can delete the clone on DR side.
Regards,
Don
Note: Older versions of ESXi iSCSI networking did not support routing. So if the DR goes through a router you can Discovery the volume but never connect to it. I believe it was 6.0 that added that capability.
Thomas Vit
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July 18th, 2019 00:00
dwilliam62
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1.5K Posts
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July 18th, 2019 06:00
Hello,
You are very welcome!
I am glad that you were able to get it working.
What's great about this process is once you have it worked out it becomes very easy to restore a VM or even a single file.
For the VMDK restore, you can use the built-in copy/paste of the VMware GUI to copy the VMDK file from the DR site to primary.
For a file restore you mount the VMDK to another VM, then do the copy at the OS level. I suggest another VM because while you can attach a VMDK live in VMware you can't remove it without shutting down first.
Regards,
Don