SRM 5 IBM Nseries SRA 2.0 - Paired array manager not found

[thexvw]

Hi,

I have an SRM 4.1 installation which was working fine using two IBM nseries 3600 (netapp) filers on Fibre Channel. We are moving to vsphere 5 so decided to upgrade these installations to VC\ESXi\SRM 5. We are now getting an error message when trying to enable the array pairs:-

"Paired array manager not found. A paired array manager must be added for each site before enabling the array pair".

Everything else seems to map ok, placeholders, networks etc. I put a call into VMware who referred me to back to IBM saying it is a issue with the SRA.. IBM initially said that they did not support SRM 5 or their SRA! I pointed out that their SRA is only used for SRM so they are now reconsidering this stance.

In the meantime I have reinstalled VC\SRM\ESXi5 and the SRA just to rule out any issue with the upgrade. I am getting the same error message.

Any ideas on this?

Thanks

[Smoggy]

would need to see the SRM log.

question.....are you using snapmirror compression by any chance? i've seen this issue recently where the customer had connection names different to the controller names defined for snapmirror compression, these different names confuse the SRA as it thinks they are different controllers. workaround was to give the compression connections the same name as the controller.

[thexvw]

Hi, we are using ip addresses to define the controllers in SRM, however, it does come back with a message saying that it cant find "nseries1-smirror".

Nseries1 is the name of one of our storage controllers which I guess is being picked up from dns. However the "-smirror" part isnt defined anywhwere that we can see. I have even tried calling the controllers "nseries1-smirror" to see if that made a difference. I have been thinking along the same lines about some sort of naming conflict. We are not using snapmirror compression.

[cserpa]

I am having a very similar issue except that in my case the destination filer sees the source filer as HOSTNAME.DOMAIN.NAME so when I try to pair them in SRM there is mismatch because the source filer is imported to SRA only as HOSTNAME but the destination is looking for the pair array of HOSTNAME.DOMAIN.NAME.

Were you able to solve the problem? If so how?

[GuteBysen]

Hello

I had similar problem, if you did a fresh OS install (like i did), you must make sure that the PATH for running PERL scripts are there on the server that runs SRM. Because IBMSVCSRAUtil does NOT add this into OS... Nor does it say that it needs this in setup or install instructions... It took me several hours to figure this out.

Cheers

[thexvw]

Hi, I have checked the Perl paths are present. Did you also get the Paired array manager message? Would you mind telling me exactly what you did to resolve this?

Thanks

[cserpa]

I have a case opened with both NetApp and VMware...nothing yet...NetApp wants to say it is something with SRM but the problem is that when the Snapmirror relationship is created and even though it works between sites, my DR filer sees the primary filer as FQDN:/VOLUME and not HOSTNAME:/volume as my primary does. When the arrays are added to SRM it brings the hostnames of the filers from the snapmirror relationship so it is doing a lookup at the filers to find out what the names are. So frustrating because i am ready go deploy this and this is keeping me from moving forward.

[cserpa]

As suspected the issue was with NetApp and not with VMware. The problem is how Operations Manager / OnCommand Core created the SnapMirror relationships between the filers. Once I created the snapmirror relationship manually through CLI each filer was seen as HOSTNAME:/VOL and no FQDN was present. Once that was functional I tried to pair them again and TA-DA! So I closed both cases with each company with regards to SRM but created a new case with NetApp to see why the problem with OM.

[thexvw]

Thanks, are you able to tell me which version of Ontap you are using please. The latest reply I have had from netapp is suggesting that Vsphere5\SRM will only work with ontap 7.3.6  and VWM_SATP_ALUA and VMW_PSP_RR?

http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/detail.php?deviceCategory=san&productid=3163&deviceCat...

[thexvw]

Ok, its now paired! Thanks for all your replies. It was a naming issue. For some reason, (can't remember why), when we defined the source filer in the ontap snapmirror wizard we called it "nseries1-smirror", this worked fine in vsphere\SRM 4, but not in vsphere5\srm5.

We had realised from the error message that SRM couldn't find "nseries1-smirror" so we had added in an alias for nseries1-smirror in the nseries dns records (which didn't make any difference). So I ran back through the Ontap snapmirror wizard and renamed the source filer nseries1. Once this was done the arrays paired up. SRM is working fine

Thanks again.