I’ve recently set a customer up with new VNX storage arrays, RecoverPoint , and it’s all to be integrated with VMware Site Recovery Manager.  Previously, the customer used SRM in conjunction with MirrorView/A.  Why RecoverPoint?

The really cool thing about RecoverPoint is you can easily rollback to specific points in time, as they like to call it DVR functionality for disaster recovery.  MirrorView/A only allows you to rollback to a specific snapshots at specific points in time.

EMC also provides their VSI for VMware environments.  This integrates with many of their storage products, including VNX, RecoverPoint, and it provides the DVR selection ability within SRM if you integrate it as well!

Setup is pretty straight forward:

1. Deploy the OVA for the VSI in each site.
2. Login to the VSI’s web portal by hitting https://<ip>:8443/vsi_vum with user name admin and password ChangeMe.  Change the password as prompted.
3. Install the VSI’s plugin with vCenter by going to VSI Setup and provide the required info.  If you don’t get “The Operation is successful.”, do it again unless you’re provided an error to troubleshoot.  For me, that happened on one of the two vCenter servers I was deploying this on.  Also, be patient, as this can take quite sometime.  For me, the plugin took about 10-15 minutes to complete the installation.
4. Login to the vCenter Web Client, and go to vCenter Inventory Lists. At the end, you should see an EMC VSI section. 
5. Click on Storage Integration Service.  Under Actions, click Register Solutions Integration Service, and enter the VSI’s info for that vCenter.  Click Test to ensure there’s connectivity to the VSI, and click OK.
6. Under Storage Systems, add the storage array for that site.  Again, click Test to ensure there’s connectivity to the storage array, and click OK.  VSI supports VMAX, VNX, VNXe, ViPR, and XtremIO, so this isn’t just limited to the VNX on this project.
7. Under Data Protection Systems, add the RecoverPoint cluster info for that site using the RPA cluster IP address, and be sure to select RecoverPoint as the Protection System Type.  Click Test to ensure communication will work.  If successful, OK will no longer be grayed out.  Click OK.
8. Repeat step 7, but select SRM this time for the Data Proection System type.  Here’s where I ran into a gotcha.  The FQDN/IP address and port fields were grayed out.  I went ahead and clicked to Test, and got an error: “Could not communicate with the data protection system SRM at <IP of vCenter server>. Details: Cannot reach the target SRM server at <IP of vCenter server>:1” Google didn’t yield any results for a solution, so I began troubleshooting.  Thankfully, I knew my ports, and decided to click the check box for the FQDN or IP/Port line, and entered in the FQDN of the SRM server and the port.  Be aware that SRM 6.X uses 9086.  I provided that, clicked Test, got my green “OK to go” text, and clicked OK.

Note that this needs to be done for each vCenter/RPA cluster/storage array/SRM server in the environment.  Note also only one VSI instance can be registered per vCenter server, so you’ll need to deploy one VSI per vCenter.

After setting up each site, go to a VM, click it, go to Manage, view the snapshots for its Consistency Group, click the one you want and apply, and launch your Failover or Test action from SRM.

And there you have it!