Manage remote systems and setup replication

Hello everyone.

Welcome to another how to video with Nexsan on myself. Richard Hornsby, today we're talking about managing remote systems and setting up replication as well.

Okay, so there's a fair bit to get through. So let's get going. What I've got in front of me as I've got a couple of unity systems. I've got Unity 2k on the dot 30 address and a 4k system on the dot 50 address. Okay. Now what we want to do is we want to actually be able to manage both of the storage arrays from just a single pane of glass. So you can see here we've got a drop down menu. I've just got the one unit in there at the moment, so let's make life easy for ourselves. So I just want to click on Unity systems and then connect remote Unity system.

So here I know the IP address, but obviously you know, if your DNS is good, the name will work. That's absolutely fine. So let's go 10.21.21.50 I'm going to head click on Apply. It's going to go away. It's going to scan for that Unity array. It will bring it into the the kind of the system that you get, the GUI that you can see in the background, you'll see the name and the status, etc, etc. Then it will allow us to kind of choose which system we want to use. But this takes a while to do, so feel free to fast forward.

Hopefully I'll try and pause the recording.

Okay, that's done. So Unity has successfully connected to the remote Unity system, and now you can see it behind and it's now appears in this drop down menu as well, so you can flick between the two. So just a nice way of configuring what you have, just to make your life easier. So that's great.

Let's Let's now talk all things replication. So all I've got is on this kind of what I'm going to use the source machine. I've got a storage pool configured. I don't have anything else. I've not got a file system yet. We'll add that in. But on the destination or the target storage, I don't have anything. I don't even have a storage pool. Nothing at all. But that's fine, because the replication task that we set up will create that okay.

So if we head back to the source machine, let's go ahead and, first of all, create the file system. So let's go file systems. Add a file system. Let's call that something sensible, like replication. If I can type, yep, that's good. Click on Next.

We can limit the space if we want to, but just for the purposes of this demo, I'm just going to take all the defaults to be honest with you. So we're going to click on next again here, I'm just going to click on next now, we're not going to enable snapshotting. There's another video on that, but you'll notice here it says replication, and it's not letting us do that, but that's okay, okay? That's because when we're creating the file system, we need to have replication kind of set up from the pool level when we're not there yet. Okay, we'll do that in the next task. So don't worry about that for now. That's not a disaster. We'll, we'll, we'll show you that will make sense in a while.

So let's just go ahead and click on Next, and that's it. Just a summary. We'll go ahead and click on Create, and this will take a while to do. So again, feel free to fast forward.

Okay, didn't actually take that long to do. So it's just creating that, that file share now. So we're going, I'm going to copy that, because we'll create the we'll create this share. Bear with me.

Let's copy that and let's head to our windows. Right, click, map, a network, drive, paste and finish.

Okay, so here's our nice, new shiny share. Let's go ahead. I'm just going to create a small file. We need some data to to play with. So I'm just going to create a quick text document. Let's call that data to replicate.

Since the pressure of doing a demo data to replicate, that's better. And then what we'll do is we'll actually put some data in that as well. So let's just open that file up.

And I like to keep things simple, so let's just say some data, and we'll go ahead and save that.

There you go. So that's just something for us to play with. I'll just minimize that out of the way and, okay, we've got so we're going to click on, no, I'm finished there.

Okay, so we've got a pool, we've got our file system set up, and what we'd like to do is obviously replicate it. Okay, so what we'll do is, under Data Protection, we're going to select replications, and then we're going to add asynchronous replication.

Okay, it's going to start the replication wizard.

Now this is talking about the the kind of the destination, the remote server where we want to replicate to, okay, so we need to pick a Unity system. We need to pick one of the raid sets, or the one of the virtual volumes, and. Into obviously, and just go from there, really. You can restrict that, but again, just for the sake of the demo, I'll just stick with the defaults.

Now we can set up the schedule here. Probably sensible to do. It's entirely up to you. We can go all the way down to one minute. It's asynchronous replication, but you need to be a bit sensible with that. Depending on the data, change the volume of data, etc, etc. But that seems sensible. So 10 o'clock tonight, we'll just click on Next.

Click on next again.

Now we can use fast here. So FAST here is part of Nexsan, kind of SSD or NVMe cache, just to give you blistering performance when you're dealing with stories. So we can do that. I'm going to select one of them, click on next, gives you a summary, and go ahead and click on create.

So this is now going to go ahead and create the replication job. It won't do the replication because obviously, we're just going to schedule it for later tonight, but we'll do a manual one, but this will take a while to do.

So again, feel free to fast forward.

Whilst we're waiting for that, you'll notice that on the target one, I didn't have a pool or anything, and that's okay, the replication task that we're doing here will create that for us, okay, so we'll just let that go through.

Okay, that's starting to get there now, just refreshing the Unity, and I'm done.

So it's added the replication job successfully. We'll just click on Close.

And now under replications, we have this job here, so you can see, for the pool, it tells you the data flow. This is outgoing. This is going to be pushing the data to the remote device, the target device, which is here. Okay. And now you can see that pool. So that wasn't there before, but it is now. Now there won't be a file system because we haven't actually performed the replication yet. If you were to wait until 10 o'clock tonight, that would suddenly appear, but it isn't there at the moment.

Okay, so let's head back to the source server, and we're actually going to force a replication. So I'm going to click on replicate data. Now here we can calculate the amount of storage that will, you know, potentially be used. Because what this does is, when you set up that pool, when it sets up the the target pool, it will just do it as the same size. So if you set up a pool as 10 terabytes, it will create a 10 terabyte pool on the target server. So it knows we've got a small file to kind of transfer, which is great.

We'll click, click on Apply, and it's going to go ahead and perform that replication task for us.

So here it gives you the replication status. Takes some takes a few seconds to get going, but once it does, it will fly through. What you can do is see because it will now start to create this, this file system. So you never know. We might get lucky if we refresh here and the file system may appear.

There we go, starting to go, are we going to get lucky?

Okay, we'll just be patient.

Okay, 100% so let's see if we are. There you go. So it's now created the file system, okay? And that should contain the data that we've created. So if we click onto the file system, okay, okay, that's there.

That's good - file system.

There we go. That's what I'm after.

Let's copy that, because I just want to prove the point that the data is there. So again, if we go, so again, if we go back to our desktop, let's map a network drive to it.

Paste, finish.

Hopefully what we should see is a file that we want to replicate. There you go, data to replicate. And just for completeness, if we open that file that should contain some data, and it does excellent. So that's the replication up and running. As you can see, we've got replicating from this .38 address to the .58 address. And hopefully that's enough to get you going. It's important to do. I think if you can replicate data to another, you know Unity system, then it's going to really help with your kind of any kind of disaster recovery or failover that you might need to do. But that's it, from a kind of managing remote systems and setting up replication point of view.

So thank you very much for joining me.