Very good post by Rawley Burbridge (thanks !) on SVC/V7000 and SRM/SRA. There seems to be quite some confusion around this.
I have been playing with VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0 in my lab and I ran across a setup problem that I thought I would share.
More information on VMware SRM can be found here: http://www.vmware.com/products/site-recovery-manager/. But a very high level description is that SRM, in addition to storage replication, automates the failover of VMs between datacenters.
SRM is a VMware product however it requires a storage vendor developed plug-in, called a Site Replication Adapter (SRA), to fully function. The SRA provides an interface to the back-end storage, allowing SRM to control failover.
The SRA is developed by IBM however it is available (and should be downloaded) from the VMware website. This ensures you are getting the correct version of the SRA for the version of SRM being downloaded. If you happen to need an older version of the SRA, you can download it from this site ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/storage/ds_open_api/VMWARE/SVC_SRA/.
So onto the issue I experienced…
While trying to setup the Array Managers in SRM I was receiving this error: “Failed to load SRA from ‘C:/Program Files (x86)/VMware/VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager/storage/sra/IBMSVC’. SRA command ‘queryInfo’ didn’t return a response.”
Read on here
Mahendra
/ March 8, 2012I believe you have to initiate the failover manually using SRM – which is logical since you dont really want to start the system to start initiating DR process automatically as if there was a DR scenario when it may not always be the case.
rogerluethy
/ March 9, 2012Hi Mahendra, yes it’s crucial that you are doing it manually. A Failover is your last resort and should be initiated by humans.
-Roger