Lets understand EMC Open Replicator product:- Open Replicator enables remote point-in-time copies with full or incremental copy capabilities to be used for high-speed data mobility, remote vaulting, migration, and distribution between EMC Symmetrix DMX and other qualified storage arrays. OR leverages the high-end Symmetrix storage architecture and offers unmatched deployment flexibility and massive scalability.
EMC Open Replicator is tightly integrated with EMC TimeFinder and SRDF families of local and remote solutions. Open Replicator Functionality:
- Protect lower-tier applications at remote locations.
- Pushing or Pulling data from Symmetrix DMX arrays to other qualified storage arrays in SAN/WAN environments.
- Create remote point-in-time copies of local production volumes for many purposes from data vaulting to remote testing and development.
- Ensure immediate data availability to host applications via Symmetrix DMX consistency technologies.
When to use EMC Open Replicator for migration:
1) SYMAPI cannot validate third party or non-visible storage systems.
2) To protect against potential data loss due to a SAN failure or other connectivity issue during a hot pull operation, use the donor update option. When enabled, this feature causes all writes to the control device from the host to be immediately copied to the remote device as well. Because the data is fully copied to both the remote device and the control devices, if a failure occurs, the session can safely be terminated and created again to fully recover from any mid-copy failure.
3) Open Replicator uses FA resources. If you are using this utility in a production environment, verify with the SA that FA bandwidth assessments have been considered and that appropriate throttling parameters (pace or ceiling).
4) When using BCVs, the BCVs must be “visible” to the remote storage array. Thus, they must be mapped to an FA and the FA must be zoned to the destination storage. We highly recommend that BCVs not be mapped to the same FA as the control standard devices to avoid a negative impact on host I/O performance.
5) If a configuration uses thin device as destination in a pull or push copy operation, full volume allocation of the thin device will be made because Open Replicator creates a full volume copy.
6) When performing an Open Replicator migration, always use the –v qualifier on the create command. This insures that, should the session fail, there will be useful information returned as to what volume caused the error. This allows you to more quickly recognize zoning or masking issues.
7) Issuing create commands prior to Open Replicator migration activities allows confirmation that there will be no zoning or masking issues discovered during the migration window. This technique will only be successful if no changes have been made to the Symmetrix environment between issuance of the create and copy commands.
8) It is better and easier to use an Open Replicator management host for preparing, executing, and monitoring migration sessions than using one of the systems with volumes involved in the activity.
9) For Veritas file systems, PowerPath devices, and Oracle databases, when you activate the copy session devices must be frozen just before the activate is performed, and thawed as soon as the activate completes. Use the following options to with the symrcopy activate command, when applicable:
-vxfs MountPoint
-ppath srcdevs
PowerPath device
-rdb dbtype DbType -db DbName
10) The device specified in the command line must match the device in the device file or the activate will fail.
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