Fantastic session….very good content and great demos.
4.0 Features
- Virtual RPA’s
- 7x capacity
- Fan-in 4:1 or 1:4
- SRM any point in time support with RP
- New Unisphere looking RP GUI
- Sync replication over IP
4.0 Themes covering in this session – Virtual RPA, Simplified UI, Any PiT with SRM, REST API, Hyper-V CSV Support, Multi-Site (4:1, 1:4) w/8 kb protected LUNs
4.0 Themes not covered in this session – eLicensing Self-Service, 2 PB per cluster, Sync over IP, Customer Upgradeable, Application QoS, 400 MB/s async per application, FIPS 140-2
More after the jump…
Why RP for VMware? Local & Remote, Any Storage, Scales to 1000s of VMs, Sync & Async, Physical & Virtual, VAAI
Can do cross-array consistency groups – very cool – SRM is aware of this.
SRM Point in Time Capabilities
- Components
- vCenter 5.0 and up, SRM 5.0 and up
- RP & SRA
- Config: new CG policy
- Operation: VSI 5.5 (base and plugin) to select points in time – fully managed by vCenter
- 3 main uses cases
- 1. DR Test with Any PiT
- Why? Test earlier PiT, App-consistent PiT, re-test same PiT, re-test with different PiT
- Re-testing same PiT is really good to me.
- 2. Operational Recovery to any PIT
- Retrieve data from 30 minutes ago
- Can do this with RP but SRM makes it much easier to use this method for day to day recoveries
- Use SRM to bring app up and then extract data however desired.
- THIS IS VERY COOL.
- 3. Actual Failover to DR site
- Will my failed-over image work?
- Straightforward
- 1. DR Test with Any PiT
- Demo of UI
- Unisphere UI for RP is quite nice.
- Make bookmark for RP, then use VSI in vCenter to “apply” whichever PiT you want, then it’s just regular SRM interface.
Virtual RPA
- No cost – just pay for software.
- Need OE 5.32.000.5.201 and an iSCSI SLIC
- Need to have iSCSI connectivity between VNX & ESX
- Each vRPA should have 4-8 GB RAM, 2-8 vCPUs, 3-20 GB Ethernet
- When physical vs. virtual?
- Virtual for low-end workloads for low-end VNX workloads
- One vRPA tested to sustain 8500 IOPs, 80 MB/s throughput
- Number based on 8 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM (no details on processor type)
- Performance is linear in the number of vRPA’s
- Use EMC’s planning tools
- Demo of vRPA – takes about 40 minutes including progress bars (demo was 5 minutes). Very easy…
Hyper-V Support
- Failover with Hyper-V & CSV
- Support for ODX – Offload Data Transfer
- ODX supported with 05.32.000.5.21 for VNX splitter
- ODX supported with any RP release that supports R32
- ODX supported between two arrays actually – interesting.
Roadmap Stuff – no commitments
- If have virtual appliance, why not embed it into the array?
- 3 options – physical RPA, vRPA in ESX, vRPA in the array.
Questions
- FC capable
- Yes, can split FC workloads to the vRPA via iSCSI but just have to keep ghroughput in mind – i.e. 10 Gig iSCSI
- any offload in physical RPA
- processor type for the vRPA spec?
- 12 core Sandy Bridge
Think Meta 
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