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Do you need the ultimate in application and data up time? Are your recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives 0. Then this is the demo for you as we dive into how to configure Active cluster to meet the uptime demands of your most critical workloads. Let's get into it. Active
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Cluster is pure storage flash ray's implementation of synchronous replication for the always on data center and applications. Providing an RPO of zero so you don't have to worry about data loss and an RTO of 0 with automatic transparent failover with zero user intervention to give you peace of mind. Active Cluster was designed to be simple to manage and even easier to implement with 4
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steps from start to finish. We'll be walking through those exact steps in this demonstration using our Active Cluster test drive lab. So if you want to follow along or try it out on your own hardware, this demo will guide you through. But enough talking, let's roll up our sleeves.
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And here we are in the Active cluster test drive demo, which is the exact same demo environment that you'll have access to if you wish to go through this on your own time. So to set up this, the active cluster and the replication between the two arrays, the first thing we need to do is go ahead and launch Google Chrome.
01:23
And get into each of the systems. So in this lab environment, you do have two flash arrays, Flash array 1 and Flash array 2. We went all out with the naming convention, but those are gonna be the two arrays we're gonna work with to set up the replication. So the first thing we're going to do is we're actually going to log into Flash array 2
01:41
because what we want to get is the connection key or basically the security key to make the handshake between Flash array 1 and Flash array 2. So we'll log into Flash array 2, we'll use Pure user with the administrator password, and we'll get into the pure flash array interface or the GUI. And as you see here, we land on our dashboard. On the left we've got our navigation menu and
02:03
since we're dealing with kind of a protection strategy or protection element, we're gonna go into the protection note here on the left, and as you'll see on the right and in the middle of the screen, it says. Great connections and we have nothing listed because this is a very clean environment. There's no pre-existing connections to a remote
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array or whatnot. So like I said, what we want to do is copy over the connection key. So we'll click on the burger menu here on the right and click get connection key. Click on that key will show up here on the screen and we're going to go and just click copy. To get it copied over to our clipboard and just
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say, OK. From there, we're pretty much done with Flash array 2. We're gonna go over to a different Google tab and launch Flash array 1. Give that a second here to log in. And pure user with our admin creds, and we'll log in again.
03:00
And just like before on Flash ray 2, we're gonna go ahead and go into the protection node and then back to this array connections area, and again, you'll see that there's no arrays connected to this system. And instead of clicking on the quote unquote burger menu, I'm just gonna click the little plus sign here for the ad,
03:17
so connect array. And for management address, you could input IP or DNS. We're gonna use the DNS name of the array, so it's flash array 2.testri.local. And then for the type, since we're doing active cluster, we're doing synchronous replication, so we're gonna select sync rep from the dropdown, and then we're gonna input that all
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important connection key, so I'll copy paste that in here. Uh, we don't need to worry about the transport or the replication address. We're just gonna go and click connect. It should take a second or two and we've connected. So as you see here now in the middle of the screen on array connections where it was empty
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before, we now see flash array 2. It's got our green dot showing everything is healthy. We've got the connected status. It's letting us know this uh replication type of sync wrap. We've got the purity version, which is 6.5 and some other information.
04:12
If we go over to Flash array 2. We should see the the same but the reverse, so I'll refresh the screen and we should say Flash array one, which we do green connected dot, connected sync rep, so on and so forth. So we now have the initial connection between the two systems. So let's go back over to Flash array 1.
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Now the next thing we want to do is we want to create a pod or what we call a pod, which is a consistency group or an envelope to hold the volumes that we're going to be creating and replicating across these two arrays. So to do that, we're gonna go over to the storage node here on the left, we'll click on pods, and as you'll see just like before,
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since this is a clean system, there's no pre-existing pods, nothing's already created. So we're just gonna go ahead and click the plus sign to create a new pod. And I'm gonna call this pod demo. Langer to give it, you know, a real unique name.
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And with our pod created, we now just go ahead and click into it and as you see it's a lot of empty. There's not a whole lot going on in the screen you see that we have the arrays that shows Flash array one status online, which makes perfect sense because that's the system we're on, but you see that there's no volumes, there's no volume snapshots,
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just again because we haven't created anything as of yet. So, next thing we're going to do is since we're gonna be working with volumes because we want to be replicating data, we're going to go ahead and move in. A volume, a pre-existing volume into this pod by using this burger menu and clicking the drop down. Now if you're following this lab, you know,
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like I said, through the test drive lab, this is exactly how you'd want to do it. But if you're in the lab or again if you're doing this on your own, you can also create a new volume by clicking the plus sign. It's just that something does already exist here, so we're just gonna use that for this demo. So we're gonna hit the burger menu, click move
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in. And we're gonna work with this Windows volume because that's what's actually mounted to the Windows box in the lab that I'm working from. So we're gonna say Windows volume one, and then we're going to add it to the protection group. Which is the pod demoinger, the one that we're working with, so we just click select.
06:28
And then we'll click move and now we've got our first volume into this pod. Now we're not quite done yet though. this volume, this Windows volume currently only exists on Flash array one, so we need to get a copy of it or we need to get not copy but get it synchronized with Flash array 2. So what we need to do now is in this array
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section, we need to add. The second array or the remote array, and I'll do that now, but what I also want to call it is when I add it, because it might happen really quick, you'll see a synchronization and then it will go online in this kind of this status window. So depending on how quickly this goes, if you blink, you might miss it.
07:09
So I just wanted to call it out while I do this. So if I click add. I'm going to get the add array pop up menu. It already knows what pod we're in. Uh, I've got this remote array drop down since it already knows a flash array too. I see that in my pick list.
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Now granted in a production scenario or in your environment, if you've got more than one remote flash array, obviously you would have a choice of arrays and this drop down just so you know it's not limited to just one system, that's just what's in this lab. So with the, the array picked, we're gonna go ahead and click add and like I said, you'll see here it says offline.
07:43
And then it should take a second. It's rethinking. And then it should go online. So, in a second here, we got 20%. And now we see that both volumes or the volume now exists on both arrays. It has been synchronized. We see statuses online for Flash array 1 and
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Flash array 2. So now if I jump over to Flash array 2 and go into pods, I see the pod demo layer, everything's online there. I see the Windows volume sitting here under the volumes area, but the next thing we wanna do though for this is we actually now need to connect.
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This volume to the Windows host, right? So we have Windows 1, which is the VM I'm on, but it's not from this array from Flash array 2, it's actually not mapped to this volume. So if I go into volumes, click on pod demoing or Windows volt 1, notice I see connected hosts, there's, there's nothing listed.
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So if we click the burger menu here on the right. I click connect, I'm gonna click Windows one, and then just go ahead and click connect. And now it shows up and we're good to go because now that I've got the volumes and the pods kind of set up and working. You know, it looks great within the GUI, but how do you know it's actually doing what I'm
09:06
saying it's doing? So what I thought I would do is go ahead and run an immeter test to show that there's going to be active IO on both the rays from the single VM. So give me one quick second, we're going to do some ice because configuration and then I'm going to jump right back in and show you ometer. OK, so with the ice cozy configuration done, I just wanted to not show all that because it
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probably bore you with it, but just so you can see it, so if I click the ice because the initiators, you see that I've got flash array 1, flash array 2. I go into devices. You know, click on one of the disks, go to MPIO that I can see that I do have multiple paths to
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both arrays, right? So you see all the paths going from this host to the volume because it's on two different arrays. So they just kind of a quick way of showing you that MPIO is set up and working. And then the next thing I wanna do is we're just gonna go ahead and launch ometer, and again, if you're following along with this lab, you'll have access to all this as well.
10:06
So we'll go ahead and go in here, we worker, so this is the D drive on this Windows box of the drive that's being um synchronous replicated. So if we just go ahead and click the start test flag. To get this running, it's gonna warm up for a little bit and it's going. There we go. And now I'm going to go ahead and look at the
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dashboard on each of the flash arrays. Now, if this is working correctly, we're going to see IO and latency and all these metrics at the dashboard level on each of these arrays. So we're gonna start with flash array one. We'll go up to dashboard, and as you can see here, we see IO, we see, you know, I ops, we see some bandwidth, we see some latinance numbers,
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like, so we see IO is being run, and you can tell that it started basically right when I clicked. The IM so that's good on Flash array one. Now if we go to Flash array 2, we click on the dashboard, we should see IO as well, basically mirroring what we're seeing on Flash array 1. So we go here and what do you know, you see the exact same metrics.
11:12
Now if I can find a good way to kind of show these side by side. Probably should have done that originally, but you can see that the diagrams are pretty much, or I shouldn't say pretty much are identical. You see the peak here, you see a peak here, see kind of a secondary peak here and it matches up here, obviously maybe not to the same scope, but you can see it in action.
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So this is showing you one VM writing to a volume that's replicating synchronously with active cluster between two arrays. And it truly is that simple to set up and configure Active cluster. But if you do have any additional questions or thoughts, reach out to your 色控传媒 account team if you're an existing customer, or if you're not,
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reach out to your reseller of choice. And of course, be sure to head over to pureStorage.com and Pier 360 for additional white paper, data sheets, and demonstrations. Thank you.
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