PlateSpin Forge supports the protection of a Microsoft Windows cluster’s business services. The supported clustering technologies are:
Windows 2003 Server-based Windows Cluster Server (Single-Quorum Device Cluster model)
Windows 2008 Server-based Microsoft Failover Cluster (Node and Disk Majority and No Majority: Disk Only models)
This section includes the following information:
Protection of a cluster is achieved through incremental replications of changes on the active node streamed to a virtual one node cluster, which you can use while troubleshooting the source infrastructure.
The scope of support for cluster migrations in the current release is subject to the following conditions:
When you perform an Add Workload operation, you must identify the active node—the node that currently owns the quorum resource of the cluster—identified by the cluster’s IP address (virtual IP address). Specifying the IP address of an individual node results in that node being inventoried as a regular, cluster-unaware Windows workload.
A cluster’s quorum resource must be collocated with the cluster’s resource group (service) being protected.
When using block-based transfer, the block-based driver components are not installed on the cluster nodes. The block-based transfer occurs using a driverless sync with an MD5 based replication. Because the block-based driver is not installed, no reboot is required on the source cluster nodes.
NOTE:File based transfer is not supported for protecting Microsoft Windows clusters.
If a node failover occurs between incremental replications of a protected cluster and if the new active node’s profile is similar to the failed active node, the protection contract continues as scheduled; otherwise, the command fails. The profiles of cluster nodes are considered similar if:
They have the same number of volumes.
Each volume is exactly the same size on each node.
They have an identical number of network connections.
Serial numbers for local volumes (System volume and System Reserved volume) must be the same on each cluster node.
If the local drives on each node of the cluster have different serial numbers, you cannot run an incremental replication after the active node flips in the event of a node failure. For example, the active node is Node 1, and it then “flips” to Node 2).
There are two supported options to support clusters in this scenario for Forge 11:
(Recommended) Use the customized Volume Manager utility to change the local volume serial numbers to match each node of the cluster. For more information, see Section B.0, Synchronizing Serial Numbers on Cluster Node Local Storage.
(Conditional and Optional) If you see this error:
Volume mappings does not contain source serial number: xxxx-xxxx,
it might have been caused by a change in the active node prior to running the incremental replication. In this case, you can run a full replication to ensure the cluster is once again protected. Incremental replications should function again after the full replication.
If you choose not to match the volume serial numbers on each node in the cluster, then a full replication is required before each incremental replication whenever the active node performs a failover to a new node in the cluster.
If a node failover occurs prior to the completion of the copy process during a full or an incremental replication, the command aborts and a message displays indicating that the replication needs to be re-run.
To protect a Windows cluster, follow the normal workload protection workflow (see Basic Workflow for Workload Protection and Recovery).
When the failover operation is complete and the failover machine comes online, you see a multi-node cluster with one active node (all other nodes are unavailable).
To failover (or to test the failover on) a Windows Cluster, the cluster must be able to connect to a domain controller. To leverage the test failover functionality, you need to protect the domain controller along with the cluster. During the test, bring up the domain controller, followed by the Windows Cluster workload (on an isolated network.)
Only a failback using full replication for Windows Cluster workloads is supported for this release.
If you configure the failback as a full replication to a physical target, you can use one of these methods:
Map all disks on the Failover machine to a single local disk on the failback target.
Add another disk (Disk 2) to the physical failback machine. You can then configure the failback operation to restore the failover's system volume to Disk 1 and the failover's additional disks (previous shared disks) to Disk 2. This allows the system disk to be restored to the same size storage disk as the original source.
After failback is complete, you can rejoin other nodes to the newly restored cluster.
You can use workload protection functionality programmatically through the protectionservices API from within your applications. You can use any programming or scripting language that supports an HTTP client and JSON serialization framework.
https://<hostname | IP_address>/protectionservices
Replace <hostname | IP_address> with the hostname or the IP address of your Forge VM. If SSL is not enabled, use http in the URI.
To script common workload protection operations, use the referenced samples written in Python as guidance. A Microsoft Silverlight application, along with its source code, is also provided for reference purposes.
PlateSpin Forge exposes a REST-based API technology preview that developers can use as they build their own applications to work with the product. The API includes information about the following operations:
discover containers
discover workloads
configure protection
run replications, failover operations and failback
query for status of workload and container status
query for status of running operations
query security groups and their protection ties
Forge administrators can leverage a Jscript sample (https://localhost/protectionservices/Documentation/Samples/protect.js) from the command line to access the product through the API. The sample can help you write scripts to help you work with the product. Using the command line utility, you can perform the following operations:
add a single workload
add a single container
run the replication, failover, and failback operations
add multiple workloads and containers at one time
NOTE:For more information about this operation, see the API documentation at https://localhost/protectionservices/Documentation/AddWorkloadsAndContainersFromCsvFile.htm.
remove all workloads at one time
remove all container at one time
The PlateSpin Forge REST API home page (https://localhost/protectionservices/ or https://<server page>/protectionservices/) includes links to the content that can be useful for developers and administrators.
This technology preview will be fully developed with more features in subsequent releases.