SRM User Guide: FlashArray Continuous Replication (ActiveDR) Workflows

User Guides for VMware Solutions
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Prerequisites

For a detailed overview of ActiveDR and VMware, please refer to ActiveDR with VMware User Guide.

Disaster recovery management is a critical piece of any infrastructure and array-based replication plays an important role in that. Ensuring that the data that runs the business is not only protected in the present production site, but also available in a separate location at a moments notice, allows the business to remain functioning in the case of a small failure or a large catastrophe. Virtualized environments such as VMware implementations are no exception.

ActiveDR provides an array-based mechanism to protect the important data in a simple and robust way over great distances with extremely low RPOs. The simplicity of management makes disaster recovery (and importantly testing your disaster recovery plans) straight-forward and repeatable.

In order for SRM to run any operations on FlashArray-hosted datastores/RDMs with ActiveDR there are a few requirements:

  1. FlashArray SRA version 4.0.0 with Purity 6.0.0 or 6.0.1. For Purity 6.0.2 or later you must be using SRA version 4.1.0 (Site Recovery Manager Quick Reference) or later if you intend to use ActiveDR
  2. Replication must be configured on the pod hosting the volumes
  3. Array managers must be configured
  4. Array pairs protecting those volumes must be enabled
  5. Volumes must be discovered by SRM
  6. The pod volumes must be added to a protection group
  7. The protection group must be in at least one recovery plan
  8. Hosts and host groups must be pre-created on the recovery FlashArray for the target recovery clusters
  9. Place volumes in protection groups for use with SRM protection groups and recovery plans. Using Hosts or Host Groups as placement for volumes to be protected by SRM has inconsistent behavior and support for this is best effort. Pure Storage is working to improve these workflows for a future release of the SRA when using host or host groups, but at this time Pure recommends avoiding using Host or Host Group placement for FlashArray protection groups

    There is no need to pre-create any recovery volumes or pre-connect anything to the recovery hosts on the FlashArray(s). ActiveDR itself automates the process of creating recovery volumes and the SRA automates connecting them to the appropriate host resources.

    Note:

    As of the 4.0 release of the SRA, Everpure does not support adding volumes not in use by the VMware environment under the control of SRM into an ActiveDR pod that has one or more volumes under SRM control. Supporting pods with non-VMware volumes to be recovered by SRM will be considered for a future release of the SRA.