EMC RecoverPoint- Standalone VM Recovery

RecoverPoint is one of my favourite products. It’s unique, reliable and has helped me out of trouble on more than one occasion.

Whilst most VM admins associate it with SRM and thus Site/LUN/Datastore recovery, it can also fill in an often overlooked gap in data protection. Pre and Post backup coverage. The ability to recover a vm (or data) in the window before or after your backups run.

Depending on your configuration, you’ll likely have journals available to recover from every few seconds for the duration of your Recovery Window. If a failure were to occur after your last backup, but before your next, this can provide another “safety net” to have available. Obviously this is determined by a a number of conditions: Link bandwidth, Data Rate of Change, Latency etc.

Start by logging into Unisphere for RecoverPoint, then click on the “Protection” tab.

Note that the Copy & Group Image access actions controls are greyed out. This is due to the Consistency Groups being managed by SRM by default. To allow the Image Action controls to be used, go to the “Policy” tab for the Consistency Group being used, and then into the “Stretch Cluster / VMware SRM Support”.

Click on the “Group Policy” Tab, and change the “External Management, Managed By:” option to “RecoverPoint” & click Apply, then close the Success dialog. You could do this to more Consistency Groups using RPCLI/Powershell as I’ve shown in this link.

Return to the “Status” tab, expand the CG and highlight the “CRR” and the action buttons will be available.  Click on the “Test Copy” button.  The Wizard will start. (This was formerly known as Enable Image Access).

We want to pick a specific Image/Bookmark/Journal from the list so click the arrow and choose “An image from the list”. The list of available images will be displayed. The amount of images will depend on the applicable Protection Window available to the LUN. Choose an image

• The most suitable access mode for testing is the default “Logged Access”. This requires less steps and best performance, at the expense of being slower to configure during testing. It can then be copied/cloned off to another datastore.
• Click on “Next Test the Image” and wait while the system processes the test

Now you need to logon to your Virtual Centre host, select a host, and under configuration, storage adaptors, select an adaptor and select Rescan All.

The Replica LUN will be shown as a “snap” Datastore that can be browsed.  Browse the Datastore, find the folder for the VM’s VMX you want to test and add it to the VM Inventory, labelling it clearly. If you’re testing, bring it up in an isolated network to avoid conflicts.

After you start the VM, when prompted, choose “I copied it” to prevent creating duplicate uuid’s.

The VM will start and can be tested or copied/cloned for Recovery.

Keep an eye on the Image Access log capacity, ensuring it doesn’t fill up.

  When you’re finished, shutdown any VM’s on the Replica LUN and remove them from the VM Inventory. Don’t ‘delete file from disk’, but unmount the Datastore.

From the RecoverPoint GUI, choose the “Cancel” option and the Image Access will be reverted and the hosts will lose access to the Image.

Change the “group Policy” for the Consistency Group back to “External application” to allow SRM to control the operations. (Normal).

The process is now complete. Now you have another easy, reliable option in your recovery toolkit.