Create an Immutable Snapshot of an Arcserve Datastore on Unity and use it for DR – Part 2

Hello everyone.

Welcome to part two in this short mini series of how to videos with myself, Richard Hornsby and Kevin green. So in part one, we've kind of created the replicated data store ready to do some snapshots. So in this bit, that's what we're going to do. So this is just rolls off the tongue, but it's creating a mutable snapshots of an arcserve data store on Unity and use it for Dr. And I guess that's the important bit, right? Is the ability to roll back and recover in a disaster recovery situation. So that's enough from me. Let me hand over to you. Kev, I'll stop sharing my screen.

Okay. Hello again, everyone, hopefully you can see my screen. We are back to the arcs of unified data protection main console. I just want to basically bring up the recovery point server and the data store we created in part one. And as you can see, we've replicated, well, 132 gig of data, and it's occupying space of 73 just to show you that we have some space.

Now when we actually create a mobile snapshot and we need to mount it back within the arc serve environment. We can't do it back to the same server because the data already exists. So we have to do it to a recovery environment. So the first step we're going to do is actually go to the Nexsan Unity console, and because we want that mount point only to be presented to the recovery environment. We go back to system host connectivity, and this time, we're going to create another initiator group, just like we did before. Right at the beginning, we're going to add an initiator group. We're going to call this recovery VM, and then we're going to go to recovery VM and grab the IQN now that's in my RDP session here. So I open up the ask as initiator configuration, copy all of this and place it in here.

So what you're saying here, Kevin, is, if your primary kind of our arcs of UDP, RPS, server appliances down. Obviously, you'd need to launch this into a new recovery scenario, wouldn't you, so you need to be ahead of the game.

Correct. Now, normally, when you go through any kind of implementation with arcs of if you're using any kind of immutable platform, one of the recommendations will be to have a virtual machine created with arcserve installed. There is no licensing from an arc serve point of view, it's just for recovery.

Now that doesn't stop us recovering that immutable snapshot back to the original, but we'd first have to remove the original from the interface or it would clash. So But from our point of view, the Nexsan is straightforward. We've created another initiator group. So now what we're going to do is create an immutable snapshot.

So for that to occur, go to storage. Now, again, this can be automated, but I'm going to do it manually. If today, go to LUNs and I'm just going to click take a snapshot.

In this case, I'm going to turn on immutability. Now I can choose a time also, once this has been set, I can increase that time as well. So if I accidentally left it for one day and I thought, oh, I want that for 31 days, I can go and actually extend that time.

Now I need to type in all of below,

But you do have to be careful with that. Don't you come because if you set it for 365, days, for example, or 1000 years, then it is stuck. You can't delete it, guys, it is immutable. So just be careful with what you're setting here. Okay, yeah.

And even if you actually go back and do what I tried originally is I tried to delete the LUN, tried to actually delete the array, you'll get a message saying, none of these perform that none of these actions can be performed because you have immutable snapshots in place. So by just even trying to wipe the array, that can't be done so you're fully protected. So yeah, be careful when you set this setting, that you don't set it for too long.

So I'm now going to take snapshot, and when that's completed, we can now start looking to mount it. So to mount that snapshot to the other recovery VM, we go back into data protection snapshots, choose the storage pool, choose the data set, and now there's our snapshot. It's a manual one. It's immutable. And again, there's options here. I can extend the retention date, I can actually roll it back, or, more importantly, and imagine you've got 10, 15, 20 of these things, and I want to test a point in time.

I hit the Manage Browse button, choose the time, but the initiated group, I change to recovery VM.

Now only the recovery VM is going to see this actual snapshot, this pattern, this bound point I choose Browse. Process started. Now from here, I just simply go into the recovery screen. Don't even need to wait for it to finish, because it's going to be done. There we go. Go back to arc, serve, bring open the recovery environment.

I need to find the ice, because this, so this is back to just using standard ice, because initiator practices go to discovery, put in the portal name. So it's 192.168.1.33 and that's just the IP address of the unity. Unity, correct? Yeah. And once we do, there's the target. I just need to connect.

Once it's connected, I come back down to Windows. Now, straightforward. Right click on the task bar, dismanagement.

There we go. There's my E drive. It's already found it now, because I'm a little bit the way I am, I'm going to basically change that drive letter to N, because that will map the original data store configuration to the N. If I don't, I've just got to change the path, and I'll show you what I mean.

So I'm going to make it N drive.

There we go. All done. Now the simple point from arc service point of view is open the dashboard, go to Resources, recovery point servers. Now, before originally on part one, we did right click, create, add a data store we're importing this time. This is the important difference, and all we need to go to is the N drive and the common folder that holds all the information contained in the data store.

And I need the Encryption Password. Remember, I made a point of this in part one. If you don't know this password, you cannot re import the data store. Let's see if I got it right.

There we go. Now, what I meant earlier was, if I'd have left it as E, these are picking up the original designators, so I'd have to change them to E drive. I know they're okay, because I can just do browse.

Now, I also said in part one, the hash would have been kept on the SSD on the original arcserve appliance or arcserve device. Now that isn't needed for restores, but we still need a location. So to keep it simple, I'm just going to put C: Browse and patch recovery, and as long as there's nothing in there, it needs to be blank. So let's have a quick check.

There we go. It's blank. We're fine. If there's any files in there, it will complain. That's all we have to do. We don't need to touch anything else.

I can untick there or leave it. It doesn't matter, because we're not doing backups. This is only needed for backups. We are doing recovery. I hit save, okay, I need a bit more memory, so let's just up that.

Okay. It says it's already controlled by arco one, and it is the original the master LUN is protected and managed by arco one.

That's why we can't send the actual immutable snapshot to the same server. This is not a problem because we are on the recovery VM, so just choose Yes.

Give it a couple of seconds. There's a data store, and it's starting now, this will go red.

Red is not bad. In this case, red means degraded. It just means I can't do any backups. This is about recovery, immutable, protection, recovery, so as long as I can restore, that's all that matters. So from a point of view of that, I can click on it, I can see all the backups.

Now, in the next part of this series, we're actually just going to go through a couple of restore steps to show you how to restore and do also what's called an instant on, or instant virtual machine, but using the performance of the Unity, this is where the difference is. A lot of immutable platforms out there are actually quite slow at reconstructing the data when it's needed for a restore, because the Unity is a high performance device, you actually get almost real time speeds compared to the even the original device. So the Unity is a high performance unit, which is when you think about it from an RTO point of view, if the worst happens, the most important thing we need to consider is, how fast can we get our data back? It's all right having it on immutable platform, but if it's slow, then it's going to cause a problem for the business. If the immutable platform is a Unity, we've got high speed recovery, even from an immutable read only snapshot.

So that's it for today. We'll get on to part three very soon. Thank you.

Brilliant, Kevin.
Thank you very much.

So, just to kind of recap, I mean, we've created, you know, the kind of the replicated data store stats good. You know, to have the data store elsewhere was great on the Unity. Then we created the immutable snapshot. But it's just how easy it was to recover from that immutable snapshot. You know, you didn't have to do any particular lengthy steps on the Unity. You just mounted it, presented it to the new arcserve server and imported it really, really simple. So thank you very much for that. Kevin, much appreciated, and we'll see you all in part three.

Thank you.