vmmigrate local/remote sites.

[Jason_L]

I am trying to use HPVM in a DR configuration.   2 XP’s at different sites.  The XP’s run Continuous Access (CA), which replicates data from the primary site, to the secondary.

The primary site VM hosts (bl860i2’s) share the same storage and we have no problem migrating VM guests between these hosts, since they share the same luns from the primary site XP.

The DR site VM hosts (860i2’s) are presented Continuous Access luns, so the luns presented to the DR VM hosts are replica’s of the primary site luns.  What we do is shutdown the VM on the primary site, and split the CA pairs.  This is done to mimic a disaster on the primary site.  We then want to migrate the VM Guest from the primary site to the DR site.  We have the network set up properly with SSH and connectivity is OK. The network part seems to work good.

However, when we attempt to migrate the VM from the primary to the DR site, the VM Guest fails with error (Device /dev/rdisk/diskXX has no match on this HPVM server). The luns ARE mapped on the DR server, with the same HPUX device path. However, these are not the SAME luns that were mapped from the primary site, they are copies from the CA configuration.  I believe the problem is that during a migration the VM Guest is checking the WWID of the luns for a match, and of course they would not match in this case because it is not the same XP that the VM Guest was using on the primary site – they are copies. 

From reading documentation, there is a way to disable WWID checking during the migration, but I am not sure what this exactly does.   So the lun would contain the same data, but it would not have the same WWID.

Anyone have ideas on how/if this cfg will work?

[chris huys_4]

Hi,

I dont think the setup described, is really supported, with hpvm. (If in doubt , log a official hp support call to check for the supportability of the setup.)

But I read somewhere that adding the -F option to the hpvmmigrate command, to not care for errors, could work.

Best Regards,
Chris

PS. A supported setup, might be, but this is my own idea, again a support call with hp should be logged, to get a official answer,  if fc routers are put between the different sites, lsan (with brocade sanswitches) zoning configured, so that every site can see for its local servers, both the local storage and also the remote storage on the remote sites.

[Jason_L · Accepted solution]

So I did log a case.  This ended up being a problem with doing online migrations to shared storage or...in affect asymmetric storage.

The 2 XP's do have access to the same data, but really...they are not the same Luns.  They are replicated Luns.  Now, what we ended up doing was creating a virtual machine at the DR site and gave it the same attributes of the system at the primary site.  We then tested that we could shutdown the prod hpux system, split the CA pairs (stop replication) and bring the hpux server and application online at the DR site utilizing the replicated data on the DR site XP. 

So really, this provides the type of redundancy we were looking for.