For the last several weeks I’ve been waiting with bated breath for VMware to approve the EMC MirrorView Site Recovery Adapter (SRA) for VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM).  I’ve checked the VMware site many times only to be disappointed that it was not showing up.  There was talk of it on VMware Communities Roundtable Podcast and Twitter, but no one seemed to have an official update for me.  Finally, one of our very informed consultants came to my rescue and let me know what needed to be done to get SRM 5.0 working with MirrorView.  He informed me that you can use the EMC VNX SRA along with a new plug-in called an enabler.

The SRA is necessary for SRM to communicate with your flavor of storage, so it’s definitely an important piece to the puzzle and SRM 5.0 is not compatible with the previous versions of SRA.  So, without further ado, this is what needs to be done to upgrade or install SRM 5.0 if you are using EMC MirrorView.

You will need to download the following from the VMware site:

  • Site Recovery Manager 5.0 Self Extracting Installer
  • EMC VNX SRA

And download the following from EMC via the Powerlink portal:

  • Navisphere CLI (Home>>Support>>Software Downloads and Licensing>>Downloads J-0>>Navisphere Server Software)
  • MirrorView Enabler (Home>>Support>>Software Downloads and Licensing>>Downloads A-B>>Adapters for Third-Party Applications)

Here are the installation steps you’ll need to take:

  1. Uninstall any existing SRAs you have installed at both the protected site and recovery site.  I would recommend doing a reboot after uninstalling just to keep it clean.  *A tip-when installing any part of SRM: a reboot of the servers will fix 95% of any problems you seem to be having.
  2. Backup your SRM database according to the vendor instructions.  For instance, if you’re using SQL as your database, you pretty much just need to right-click on the SRM database, select the backup option and then follow the wizard.  See this site for more detailed instructions.
  3. Double-click on the SRM installer icon on the vCenter server at either the protected site or the recovery site (whichever you choose to start with first).  It will detect if there is an existing installation and give you the option to choose upgrade if you have a previous version installed.
  4. Install the Navisphere CLI.  The Navisphere CLI is necessary to install the EMC SRAs and enabler.
  5. Install the EMC VNX SRA.  This is a simple install in which you can accept any default that might be offered.
  6. Install the EMC MirrorView enabler and again you can click OK through the wizard.
  7. Now repeat steps 3-6 at your other site

At this point you should have SRM installed at both sites and the SRM service should be running on both vCenter servers at both the protected and recovery site.  I ran into some issues here at one of my sites.  It had to do with the log on user on the SRM service.  For some reason the “local system” account worked on my previous installation, and it worked at one site, but not the other.  I had to go in and change the log on user on the SRM service to a domain service account that had the appropriate permissions on the database. To do this:

  1. Go to Start>>Run and type in services.msc
  2. Right click on the VMware SRM service and click properties
  3. Click on the Log On tab
  4. Click on the This Account radio button and specify or browse to a service account in your active directory and put in the correct password
  5. Restart the service.
  6. It’s recommended that you use the same service account at both sites, so repeat steps 1-5 at your other site.

Hopefully by now you should have SRM up and running. Now, where do you configure it? I always forget this step and wonder what I did wrong so I thought I’d make sure to include it in this post.  You just need to download and install the plug-in wherever you are running your vSphere client.

  1. Open your vSphere client
  2. Click on Plug-ins at the top
  3. Scroll down and you should see the option to “download and install” SRM.  Click on the “download and install” link
  4. Restart the vSphere client

Now you should be all set.  Just click on Home in the vSphere client and click on the SRM icon under Plug-ins on the home screen.  I won’t go into configuration in this post because that is a very broad topic depending on your configuration.  However, if you’re interested in reading about that I highly recommend Mike Laverick’s (read: SRM guru) Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0.  It’s very readable and full of a ton of useful information about specific storage vendors and of course configuring SRM.  VMware’s site also has a plethora of documentation including the Administrator’s Guide.