EMC Unity Hybrid Storage for Azure Cloud Integration

The customers who have placed their workload in both on-premises and cloud forming a “Hybrid Cloud” model for your Organisation, you probably need on-premises storage which meets the requirement of hybrid workloads. EMC’s Unity hybrid flash storage series may be … Continue reading →

Configuring EMC DD Boost with Veeam Availability Suite

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This article provides a tour of the configuration steps required to integrate EMC Data Domain System with Veeam Availability Suite 9 as well as provides benefits of using EMC DD Boost for backup application. Data Domain Boost (DD Boost) software … Continue reading →

Veeam integrate with EMC and NetApp Storage Snapshots!

Taking a VMware snapshots and Hyper-v checkpoint can produce a serious workload on VM performance, and it can take considerable effort by sys admin to overcome this technical challenge and meet the required service level agreement. Most Veeam user will run their backup and replication after hours considering impact to the production environment, but this can’t be your only backup solution. What if storage itself goes down, or gets corrupted? Even with storage-based replication, you need to take your data out of the single fault domain. This is why many customers prefer to additionally make true backups stored on different storage. Never to store production and backup on to a same storage.

Source: Veeam

Now you can take advantage of storage snapshot. Veeam decided to work with storage vendor such as EMC and NetApp to integrate production storage, leveraging storage snapshot functionality to reduce the impact on the environment from snapshot/checkpoint removal during backup and replication.

Supported Storage

• EMC VNX/VNXe
• NetApp FAS
• NetApp FlexArray (V-Series)
• NetApp Data ONTAP Edge VSA
• HP 3PAR StoreServ
• HP StoreVirtual
• HP StoreVirtual VSA
• IBM N series

Unsupported Storage

• Dell Compellent

NOTE: My own experience with HP StoreVirtual and HP 3PAR are awful. I had to remove HP StoreVirtual from production store and introduce other fibre channel to cope with workload. Even though Veeam tested snapshot mechanism with HP, I would recommend avoid HP StoreVirtual if you have high IO workload.

Benefits

Veeam suggest that you can get lower RPOs and lower RTOs with Backup from Storage Snapshots and Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots.

Veeam and EMC together allow you to:

• Minimize impact on production VMs
• Rapidly create backups from EMC VNX or VNXe storage snapshots up to 20 times faster than the competition
• Easily recover individual items in two minutes or less, without staging or intermediate steps

As a result of integrating Veeam with EMC, you can backup 20 times faster and restore faster using Veeam Explorer. Hence users can achieve much lower RPOs (recovery point objectives) and lower RTOs (recovery time objectives) with minimal impact on production VMs.

How it works

Veeam Backup & Replication works with EMC and NetApp storage, along with VMware to create backups and replicas from storage snapshots in the following way.

Source: Veeam

The backup and replication job:

1. Analyzes which VMs in the job have disks on supported storage.
2. Triggers a vSphere snapshot for all VMs located on the same storage volume. (As a part of a vSphere snapshot, Veeam’s application-aware processing of each VM is performed normally.)
3. Triggers a snapshot of said storage volume once all VM snapshots have been created.
4. Retrieves the CBT information for VM snapshots created on step 2.
5. Immediately triggers the removal of the vSphere snapshots on the production VMs.
6. Mounts the storage snapshot to one of the backup proxies connected into the storage fabric.
7. Reads new and changed virtual disk data blocks directly from the storage snapshot and transports them to the backup repository or replica VM.
8. Triggers the removal storage snapshot once all VMs have been backed up.

VMs run off snapshots for the shortest possible time (Subject to storage array- EMC works better), while jobs obtain data from VM snapshot files preserved in the storage snapshot. As the result, VM snapshots do not get a chance to grow large and can be committed very quickly without overloading production storage with extended merge procedure, as is the case with classic techniques for backing up from VM snapshots.

Integration with EMC storage will bring great benefit to customers who wants to take advantage of their storage array. Veeam Availability Suite v9 will provide the chance to reduce IO on to your storage array and bring your SLA under control.

References:

Backup from storage snapshots

Integration with emc storage snapshot

Veeam integrates with emc snapshots

New Veeam availability suite version 9

 

 

 

Multi-Site Hyper-v Cluster for High Availability and Disaster Recovery

In most of the SMB customer, the nodes of the cluster that reside at their primary data center provide access to the clustered service or application, with failover occurring only between clustered nodes. However for an enterprise customer, failure of a business critical application is not an option. In this case, disaster recovery and high availability are bonded together so that when both/all nodes at the primary site are lost, the nodes at the secondary site begin providing service automatically, or with minimal intervention.

The maximum availability of any services or application depends on how you design your platform that hosts these services. It is important to follow best practices in Compute, Network and Storage infrastructure to maximize uptime and maintain SLA.

The following diagram shows a multi-site failover cluster that uses four nodes and supports a clustered service or application.

 

 

The following rack diagram shows the identical compute, storage and networking infrastructure in both site.

Physical Infrastructure

• Primary and Secondary sites are connected via 2x10Gbps dark fibre
• Storage vendor specific replication software such as EMC recovery point
• Storage must have redundant storage processor
• There must be redundant Switches for networking and storage
• Each server must be connected to redundant switches with redundant NIC for each purpose
• Each Hyper-v server must have minimum dual Host Bus Adapter (HBA) port connected to redundant MDS switches
• Each network must be connected to dual NIC from server to switches
• Only iLO/DRAC will have a single connection
• Each site must have redundant power supply.

Storage Requirements

Since I am talking about highly available and redundant systems design, this sort of design must consist of replicated or clustered storage presented to multi-site Hyper-v cluster nodes. Replication of data between sites is very important in a multi-site cluster, and is accomplished in different ways by different hardware vendors. You will achieve high performance through hardware or block level replication instead of software. You should contact your storage vendor to come up with solutions that provide replicated or clustered storage.

Examples are:

StarWind Software

Steeleye DataKeeper

EMC Recovery Point

HP Storage

Network Requirements:

A multi-site cluster running Windows Server 2008 can contain nodes that are in different subnet however as a best practice, you must configure Hyper-v cluster in same subnet. You applications and services can reside in separate subnets. To avoid any conflict, you should use dark fibre connection or MPLS network between multi-sites that allows VLANs.

Note that you must configure Hyper-v with static IP. In a multi-site cluster, you might want to tune the “heartbeat” settings, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=130588 for details.

Network Configuration Spread Sheet

Network	VLAN ID	NICs and Switch Ports speed
iLO/DRAC	10	1Gbps
MGMT	20	2x1Gbps
Live Migration	30	2x10Gbps
Storage Migration	40	2x10Gbps
Virtual Machine	50,60	4x10Gbps
iSCSI Network	70	4x10Gbps
Heartbeat network	80	2x1Gbps
Storage Replication (Separate from Hyper-v)	90	Dark Fibre 2x10Gbps

Note that iSCSI network is only required if you are using IP Storage instead of Fibre Channel (FC) storage.

Cluster Selection: Node and File Share Majority (For Cluster with Special Configurations)

Quorum Selection: Since you will be configuring Node and File Share Majority cluster, you will have the option to place quorum files to shared folder. Where do you place this shared folder? Since we are talking about fully redundant and highly available Hyper-v Cluster, we have several options to place quorum shared folder.

Option1: Secondary Site

Option 2: Third Site

Visit http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc770620%28WS.10%29.aspx for more details on quorum.

Storage Configuration:

Visit http://www.starwindsoftware.com/images/content/technical_papers/StarWind_HA_Hyper-V_6.0.pdf , http://docs.us.sios.com/ and http://us.sios.com/wp-content/uploads/sios-datakeeper-replication-multi-site-clustering-windows-servers-enterprise.pdf for clustered storage configuration for Hyper-v.

Hyper-v Cluster Configuration:

Visit http://microsoftguru.com.au/2013/06/04/windows-server-2012-failover-clustering-deep-dive/ for detailed cluster configuration guide.