Synchronous Replication across separate groups?

[JacobBernie]

Morning.

I wanted to pose a question, becuase I've gotten some conflicting information from vendors regarding Nimble's Synchronous Replication requirementes. As far as I'm aware, if you have two identical arrays, they have to be configured under the same group to allow for Sync Rep. If you don't use a witness server to handle ASO, you would have to manually failover the array's through CLI. So while I see in the white paper, that the nimble witness is technically optional. It's probably still highly recommended to use it to achieve Nimble's Peer Persistance.

We used to have this implemented, but our organization hasn't spent the extra money to get a proper SAN inplemented. And I've lost confidence in using Peer Persistance with my storage traffic on the same infrastructure as every other traffic. We love our broadcast storms and ARP poisoning, I guess.

So if I could implement Sync Rep without having both arrays in the same group, I would love some reference on when that changed. But if not, I'd rather just stick with my two separate groups for easier DR to our second site.

[Sheldon Smith · Accepted solution]

Sorry, no. Peer persistence (synchronous replication) occurs between two systems of the same model within a single group.
All networks are defined at the Group level and need to span the sites of the two systems at a Layer 2 level.

Snapshot (periodic) replication occurs between two groups.