HPE Recovery Manager Central

HPE Recovery Manager Central

This post deals with installing RMC-V which is a vCenter driven integration for backups using HPE Storage. It leverages snapshots as a backup resource allowing VMware admins to recover individual VMDK disks or VMs directly from the storage array snapshot.

The product is on version 4.0.0 currently and requires licensing which is tied to the serial number of the array. Once you extract the big Zip you'll see three subfolders:

We'll go into the VMware Image and fire up the exe below:

HPE_RMC_Installer_4.0.0-40.exe is one we want. Then we're a lot of install screens to go through:

 So, there's a licensing error to resolve. First I rebooted my vCenter Appliance as there was no way I could find in the admin console to just restart the web interface!! RMC has it's own web interface as shown below:

I was able to fix a StoreVirtual Management Cluster issue by removing it and adding the IP Address of a NODE from each StoreVirtual Management Group. It says they are "Not Licensed" at this point:

I logged into the old web client and saw the plugin registered but still initializing:

It was ready shortly after:

Here are two menu paths that expose the new options from the plugin:

This is via a Datastore or VM. There is no integration with the newer HTML 5 UI yet, only the old web client.
So, the licensing for StoreVirtual is not done in vCenter or RMC but back in the CMC for StoreVirtual:

If I try to take a snapshot I'll get this:

So, I eventually got my license key sorted out and could play with the software. I can do everything from within vCenter Web Interface ok (the old one) but there are caveats worth remembering:

• You can create a Recovery Set at the VM or Datastore level. You can retores VMs from either but only the Datastore Recovery Set lets you Restore the entire Datastore.  
• Primarily you will be taking scheduled Recovery Sets at an agreed frequency and throwing them away after a set retention time. 
• RMC without StoreOnce is still half a solution but if you get the RMC license for free as part of your new 3PAR I'd throw it in there for sure. 
• Your primary use for RMC-V is mounting a selected Recovery Set Snapshot to copy out a particular VMDK Disk and overwrite a corrupt one, or to mount it to a different VM and get at particular files. 
• Recovering a VM is done by deleting the old one, attaching the VM from the snapshot to the vCenter inventory and carrying out a storage vMotion. Don't see a way to do this directly with the RMC interface. 

The error you get when trying to restore an entire VM Recovery Set is as follows: 

Use Datastore Recovery Sets if this is your intention. You can get at everything from those anyway and it's the same volume snap on the storage anyway. 

You have to Mount a Recovery Set before you can choose the Copy/Attach/Detach options:

Note: Go to "Global inventory lists" on the main vCenter menu, then select Recovery Sets near the bottom. All the restore operations except for the full Datastore restore are triggered from here. 

Once mounted you get the option to Copy:

Or Attach:

The Recovery Set process creates a VM snapshot, then the storage snapshot before removing the VM snapshot. Be vigilant that the temporary snapshots are cleaned up as trying to restore a Datastore Recovery Set on top of Snapshots could leave your VM files corrupted or at least not straightforward. A VMware alert might be appropriate for snapshot growth over a particular size to warn you. 

Here is a manual Datastore Recovery Set process:

You can see the snapshot below while this is being generated. This should be removed once the operation completes: 

You then start to build up a choice of snapshots:

You can select any of these to restore from. 

Warning: If your Datastore has a high rate of churn, does your storage array have sufficient space to cope? Monitor the space used by the snapshots closely until you get through a few cycles of a full schedule / retention / deletion to make sure. Last thing you want is to run out of Array space. Bring in a HPE partner / HPE on this. Snapshots are useful but can cause serious issues in both VMware and your Storage if badly implemented or managed. 

To restore an entire Datastore use the Datastore View under "More Objects":

Well, that should give you an intro into the RMC-V product. Left to it's own devices it should provide additional recovery options for vCenter Admins right from their web interface. You can also use it to set up Remote Copy array replication but not ones using Peer Persistence. You may wish to limit the permissions on the 3PAR account to save the Storage admin some sleepless nights but this type of close integration is becoming common as HPE has many other plugins and integrations with VMware for this purpose. VVOLs aren't supported yet. To get the best from RMV, consider adding StoreOnce to the mix and leverage the Express Backup menu options you'll see above. They provide a demo OVF for StoreOnce for you to try out. You will need a virtual fibre adapter for the backup path so read the documentation and work with a trusted advisor before heading down that path.