Designing A Multi-Site San; Failover Manager Overview; Requirements - HP StorageWorks P4000 User Manual

1 Designing a Multi-Site SAN

The Multi-Site SAN features enable you to synchronously mirror data between sites automatically.
You create a Multi-Site SAN by configuring equal numbers of storage systems into sites in the software.
The Multi-Site SAN software enables a variety of features that are based on geographic awareness
and synchronous replication:
Multi-Site clusters that can:
Span up to three sites
Span multiple subnets
Have multiple VIPs
Geographical awareness, enabled by designating storage systems as members of a particular
site.
Synchronously replicated (mirrored) data between sites, based on volume data protection level.
Site information that ensures that data is mirrored between sites for high availability and disaster
recovery.
I/O path preferencing, so that application servers connect to storage systems located in the same
site.
Failover Manager support for automatic failover/failback in three-site configurations without re-
quiring a physical storage system in the third site.
Failover Manager for quorum management if the network connection between the two sites becomes
unavailable.
Recover quorum via CLI when a site failure also results in losing quorum in the management group.

Failover Manager overview

The Failover Manager is a specialized version of the SAN/iQ software, designed to run as a virtual
appliance in a VMware environment. The Failover Manager participates in the management group
as a real manager in the system; however, it performs quorum operations only, not data movement
operations. It is especially useful in a Multi-Site SAN configuration to manage quorum for the multi-site
configuration without requiring additional physical hardware at a site.
The Failover Manager is supported on VMware Server, Workstation, and Player. For detailed
information about installing and configuring the Failover Manager, see "Using Specialized Managers"
in the HP StorageWorks SAN Solutions Storage System User Guide.

Requirements

A Multi-Site SAN requires a feature key for each storage system in the management group that is
also participating in a Multi-Site cluster.
All sites must have the same number of storage systems. Storage systems must be added to or re-
moved from Multi-Site clusters equally.
P4000 Multi-Site HA/DR Solution Pack user guide 7