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 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.
SRM Script: SRM And RDMs
Summary: How to configure RDMs to smoothly work with VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.1.
Date: 22 March 2013
Refactor: 29 April 2025: Checked links and formatting.
While Site Recovery Manager 5.l fully supports the usage of RDMs and this also works just fine there are a few things that will work against you that need to be solved in case you ever have to do a failover recovery. And even while doing a failover test, considering these issues will help you to make your tests faster and more reliable.
The two issues in case:
These issues will mean that after recovering VMs with RDMs you'll have to set the path policy to MRU (preferred because it supports ALUA for ESXi 5.1 and NetApp Storage) and the IsPerenniallyReserved setting to true for each RDM.
Luckily I wrote a script.
SRM And PowerShell
Summary: How to work and setup powershell and powercli for VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.1.
Date: Around 2012
Refactor: 29 April 2025: Checked links and formatting.
PowerShell can be a great way to help you create the site recovery you really want. This article talks about installing PowerCLI on a SRM server installed as described here. Also, running the script automatically and adding them into your recovery plan will be discussed.