Dell EMC SC Series Live Migrate and Volume Advisor Abstract This document provides best practices for Dell EMC™ SC Series Live Migrate and Volume Advisor, features which allow SAN workloads to be seamlessly migrated from one SC Series array to another.
Revisions Revisions Date Description August 2016 Initial release June 2018 Updated to include Volume Advisor Acknowledgements Author: David Glynn Updated by: Jason Boche The information in this publication is provided “as is.” Dell Inc. makes no representations or warranties of any kind with respect to the information in this publication, and specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Table of contents Table of contents Revisions.............................................................................................................................................................................2 Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................................................................2 Executive summary..................................................................................................
Executive summary Executive summary Data center administrators are challenged with balancing workloads and resources while containing costs. Just as server virtualization enabled the mobility of application workloads across the server boundary, Dell EMC™ SC Series Live Migrate and Volume Advisor enable the mobility of storage workloads across the SAN boundary.
Introduction to Live Migrate and Volume Advisor 1 Introduction to Live Migrate and Volume Advisor Live Migrate moves a volume from one SC Series array to another without application downtime or disruption to I/O. It is not dependent on server-side agents, application integrations, or OS features, and is completely OS and application agnostic.
Introduction to Live Migrate and Volume Advisor 1.1 Live Migrate states Live Migrate moves a volume from one SC Series array to another without I/O or application disruption. During a Live Migrate, both the source and destination arrays can accept reads and writes for the volume being moved. During a Live Migrate, the relationship between the server, source and destination arrays; the volume; and where a read or write I/O is serviced; goes through several different states.
Introduction to Live Migrate and Volume Advisor 1.1.2 During data movement Figure 3 shows that once Live Migrate is configured and running, the server (1) is mapped to both the source volume (3) on the source SC Series array and the newly created destination volume (4) on the destination SC Series array. Data is asynchronously replicated from the source SC Series array to the destination array using the configured replication connection fabric (5).
Introduction to Live Migrate and Volume Advisor 1.1.3 After role swap Once the destination SC Series array is in sync with the source array as shown in Figure 4, all the existing volume data resides on the destination array. New writes can be quickly acknowledged and replicated so that a role swap can be performed. By default, Live Migrate configures this to occur automatically, which is preferred in most cases where Live Migrate is being leveraged to address an existing problem or pending risk.
Requirements for Live Migrate 2 Requirements for Live Migrate Live Migrate has the following requirements: • • • • • • Dell Storage Manager 2016 R2 or newer SCOS version 7.1 or newer No additional licensing is required, Live Migrate is included in the base licensing package Live Migrate is available on all SC Series platforms compatible with SCOS 7.1 as well as Series 40 arrays with SCOS 6.7.
Requirements for Volume Advisor 3 Requirements for Volume Advisor Volume Advisor shares the same requirements as Live Migrate and has a few additional requirements: • • The source and destination SC Series arrays must be on the same major and minor SCOS versions (for example, running SCOS 7.1 on both arrays is compliant, but running SCOS 7.1 on the source array and SCOS 7.3 on the destination array is not compliant).
Best practices for Live Migrate and Volume Advisor 4 Best practices for Live Migrate and Volume Advisor Live Migrate is a simple-to-use feature of Dell Storage Manager that makes it easier to efficiently use and manage storage. However, it is important to understand what is occurring in the background, as discussed in section 1.1, Live Migrate states. Use the following best practices to help ensure smooth and efficient movement of data.
Best practices for Live Migrate and Volume Advisor a particular source replication QoS node must share the limitations of that QoS, regardless of destination array. This can result in a Live Migrate taking longer than necessary (for example, the QoS node used was designed to protect remote replication network links from bandwidth saturation). Create a separate source replication QoS node for use with Live Migrate, and other local migration needs, to avoid this issue.
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