Ask the Expert: EMC RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines: Simple, Efficient, Proven Data Protection for VMware

This discussion is now open for questions. We look forward to a lively and informative event.

Best regards,

Roberto

any best practices around journal space ?

   Consistency Groups (CGs) and Consistency Group Sets (CG Sets) are important components of RecoverPoint for VMs' orchestration feature set. CGs allow for the creation of VM DR policy groups to perform DR, Test Copy, and Fail-back operations. CG Sets allow admins to group together CGs into logical sets and perform DR operations across multiple CGs.

This is particularly valuable where consistent bookmarking is desired (or required) between VM sets hosting components of a mission critical application. For example, a Sales Portal Use Case comprised of VMs hosting a clustered database application, and VMs hosting the corresponding web front end application.

CG sets allow you to be able to create a consistent bookmark of both the Database VMs and the web front end VMs but perform DR operations on each CG individually, or the entire set.

Is this recoverpoint 4.2 version already available or still under a beta program?

Thanks for the fast answer, Rich.

Hi Paul,

The iSCSI requirement is between the ESXi host and the vRPA. So the requirement on the ESXi host is to create an iSCSI software adapter and bind a couple of vmkernels to it. Every ESXi host in the HA cluster should have this configured on the basis of a vRPA vMotion to any ESXI host in the cluster.

Regards,

Rich

In a discussion we had with Zahid, I believe he mentioned that somewhere in the stack, iSCSI was needed... I seem to remember it was for the vRPA communication back to the array, but I've slept since the presentation. Do we need to allocate some RE's for iSCSI? If not, where is iSCSI used in RP4VM? We're really looking forward to testing RP4VM as we are 100% virtualized and RP4VM will offer more granular control over our environment. I would like to +1 the request to have RP4VM be able to snap/replicate in addition to continuous replication. Another option I'd like to see is auto-enrollment of a VM into a protection policy - similar to how the latest version of Avamar can auto-enroll protection of a VM based on it's location in a particular cluster, VM folder, etc. Today, our consumers know that if they want their VM to be part of the DR plan, they select one of the RP protected datastores as the location for the VM. In RP4VM, they would have to deploy the VM to wherever, and then go to the RP4VM tab in the vSphere Web Client to enroll the VM. I can see times where the consumer will forget to do that and believe their VM is protected when it really isn't. Some sort of compliance checking will need to be implemented by us for the initial deployment, but we'd love to see auto-enrollment in a future version. Thanks and kudos to all the RP4VM / DPAP team for making this product a reality!

Hi there

How about AppSync Integration? Surely it is not needed for granular VM Restore, but what about the Application Integration (Application Consistency) and Single-Item-Restore Features (Files, Mails, Tables)?

In the Videos posted so far, the Topology is two distant HA-Clusters each managed by its own vCenter. What about two Sites with a Stretched Cluster ("Campus" Distance) managed by a single vCenter but - is this supported too? (Separate Storage on each Site)

How is it licensed? Per VM, Capacity, Socket?

When can we test & play with it?

Thanks & Regards

Daniel

Hi Daniel,

There's no AppSync integration with RP4VM's at this time. We will be providing a vss apllication package for a VM to faciliate an application consistent image in conjucntion with a bookmarking capability. Note that crash consistent images can be used by databases to recover without issue but often the diffrence is RTO, i.e. databases recover quicker using application consistent images as opposed to crash consistent images. Also, note that when replicating synchronously, every image is application consistent.

Let me check on the stretch cluster question.

Licensing is tiered depending on the number of VMs you wish to protect starting with a minimum of 15.

You should be able to try before you buy very soon.

Regards,

Rich

I'm glad you clarified that Jesus.

Regards,

Rich Forshaw

Consultant Corporate Systems Engineer - RecoverPoint & VPLEX (EMEA)

Data Protection & Availability Division

Are RecoverPoint and RecoverPoint for VMs two different products? In other words, if one has a VMware as well as non-VMware environment, would that require two separate solutions or would one RP solution suffice?

Licensing - is it licensed based solely on VM counts or can it also be licensed based on number of ESXi/CPU sockets?

Thanks.

Hi Ernes,

Yes, two completely different products. RP for VMs is VMware specific (ESXi hypervisor splitter, vRPAs, per VM replication (as opposed to whole dtastore), storage agnostic with vSphere Web Client integrated management.

Licensing is based on tiers of VMs starting with the minimum of 15 VMs.

Regards,

Rich Forshaw

Consultant Corporate Systems Engineer - RecoverPoint & VPLEX (EMEA)

Data Protection & Availability Division

Thank you Rich.

Last call for questions on this ATE event. Last day tomorrow!

Best regards,

Roberto

Hi,

RecoverPoint for VM requires what minimum version of vsphere.