SHIFT-WIKI - Sjoerd Hooft's InFormation Technology
This WIKI is my personal documentation blog. Please enjoy it and feel free to reach out through blue sky if you have a question, remark, improvement or observation. See below for the latest additions, or use the search or tags to browse for content.
SRM Script: Start All Windows Services
Summary: How to create a script to check if all services came up correctly after a failover with VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.1.
Date: 8 April 2013
Refactor: 29 April 2025: Checked links and formatting.
This script tests if all automatic Windows Services have been started as they should have. Note that this script does not work for a test environment. The SRM server executing this script lives in production network (of course) so it will only connect to production machines. In a recovery the recovered VMs are production, so in that case it will not be a problem. For checking up on Windows services in a test, please check SRM Script in Recovered VM: Check And Start Automatic Services.
AIX Object Data Manager (ODM)
Summary: ALthough AIX is by now on version 7.3 I find these old pages so fascinating I decided to keep them. On this page I'll show you how to work with the AIX Object Data Manager. This page is for AIX 5.3.
Date: Between 2010-2013
Refactor: 21 December 2024: Checked formatting.
SRM And SnapMirror
Summary: How to fix the “Synchronize Storage” and “Create Writable Storage Snapshots” errors in VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.1.
Date: Around 2013
Refactor: 29 April 2025: Checked links and formatting.
During the testing phase of our implementation I got a lot errors during the “Synchronize Storage” and “Create Writable Storage Snapshots” steps. These are the errors we got:
Error - Failed to sync data on replica device '/vol/<volumename>/<lunname>'. Device synchronization did not complete properly Device synchronization might have been disrupted because of network failure Ensure that the storage array hosting the device is connected to the network and accessible to its peer storage array.Also check storage array for Replication errors in the snapmirror log file.
and:
Error - Failed to create snapshots of replica devices. Failed to create snapshot of replica device /vol/<volumename>/<lunname>. SRA command 'testFailoverStart' failed for device
Unfortunately, I could never really found why these errors were generated, although at 99% of the time they were given on only one of the filers. That specific filer also had SATA disks, while the other only had FC disks. I could also not replicate these errors, sometimes it just worked, and sometimes not. But, after some testing I found out that the error only occurred when snapmirror was busy. To make sure the testing went smooth I created some scripts and a prompt in the recoveryplans to make sure everything works fine.
SRM Reports
Summary: How to create a weekly report to check on the status of your VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.1.
Date: 19 April 2013
Refactor: 29 April 2025: Checked links and formatting.
Unfortunately SRM has no options to create something like a weekly report on the status of your VMs. Also, there are no powerCLI commandlets or any other option to easily create something. So, there are basically two options what can be done to create something like a weekly report:
- Contact your DBA and Business Objects administrator and let them sort out a nice report by trial and error
- Use powerCLI to create a report without any SRM specific information
The first one requires a lot of additional effort by other people, which is something that is not planned for within the project here, so I had no other option to go for the second one.
Luckily there is one thing that is common between protected VMs that is kind of SRM specific and that can be queried through powerCLI. All VMs are represented by a placeholder VM, that is created on a specific datastore called the placeholder datastore. If you follow the best practices and guidelines from VMware you could say that all VMs on that datastore are protected. So that will be the core of our report.