Disaster recovery management with EMC SRDF replication

PowerHA® SystemMirror® implements disaster recovery with SRDF storage devices by using the EMC supplied Symmetrix command-line interface (SYMCLI).

PowerHA SystemMirror uses SYMCLI to automatically manage and monitor the status of SRDF devices and SRDF links. PowerHA SystemMirror can also use SYMCLI to automatically manage the switching of the direction for the SRDF relationships when a site failover occurs. If a primary site fails, the backup site is able to take control of the resource that PowerHA SystemMirror manages from the primary site.

PowerHA SystemMirror uses SYMCLI to discover the SRDF deployment and capture any missing replication-related information from the administrator. Using this information, PowerHA SystemMirror manages the replicated devices as part of the highly available environment for the applications and resource groups.

To enable the PowerHA SystemMirror for HADR of EMC storage devices, complete the following steps:
  1. Plan the storage deployment and mirroring functions that are necessary for your environment. This step is related to the applications and middleware that are deployed in the environment, that is managed by PowerHA SystemMirror.
  2. Use the EMC tools to configure and deploy the storage devices.
    Note: Verify whether the gatekeeper devices are mapped and masked to a single host and are not shared for concurrent I/O across hosts. For more information about gatekeeper devices, go to the EMC Enterprise Single Sign-on web page (http://support.emc.com) and search for emc25597.
  3. Use PowerHA SystemMirror interfaces to discover the storage devices that are deployed.
  4. Define PowerHA SystemMirror policies for the applications or resource groups that are using the mirrored storage devices.
    Note: Complete steps 1 and step 2 before you configure PowerHA SystemMirror for HADR management of EMC storage devices.