Oracle RAC vVol test failover without SRM (import snapshot)

Our vVol 2.0/VASA 3.0 implementation which includes SRDF replication, is best implemented with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). We do not recommend using PowerCLI as there are manual processes involved and there are known issues. There's really little comparison between the two. SRM handles all the orchestration for you and is the superior solution for...

vVols, Oracle RAC, and VMware SRM

Recently I've been working on a project covering Oracle RAC running on vVols. We have more customers taking a good look at vVols, particularly now as we offer both HA (embedded VASA containers) and replication, and Oracle comes up frequently as an application they might want to run. It's fair to say we also see...

Oracle RAC on VMFS – SnapVX restore for testing

I've had some questions from customers running Oracle RAC on VMFS who would like to use TimeFinder/SnapVX to test, rather than Oracle tools like RMAN. This is a sensible course given that for large databases RMAN takes a long time to restore, and SnapVX is basically instantaneous. But why use either solution when I can...

VMAX TB and best practices

I've just completed the latest update to the VMAX/VMware TechBook, a tome (I can be derogatory since it's mine) of some 400 plus pages that explains how best to use VMware on the various VMAX/VMAX3/VMAX AFA arrays. You can find it here. When customers ask me about best practices, a link to this doc is...

SRDF/Metro and VMware Metro Storage Cluster

It's been a while since my last post - I've been busy with Virtual Volume (VVol) testing and writing a new SRDF/Metro paper which coincidentally (or perhaps obviously) is the subject of this post.  The paper covers using SRDF/Metro with VMware Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) and was just posted. You can find it here: WP...