Overview

Using VMware Cloud Director 4.0, you can perform maintenance operational tasks to the backend datastore, replicators.

Today I’d like to explain how system administrator in the cloud site can leverage the “Datastore Evacuation” capability to perform the “Datastore Evacuation” task which can evacuate the replication data from a datastore to another datastore, benefits of doing this include:

  • Ability to migrate protected instances to another storage policy (datastore) for operational maintenance.
  • Mitigates any impact to protected/migrated workloads for organizations.

How to do

To perform maintenance operations on a local datastore in the cloud site, you must first remove all incoming replications and replication data placed on that datastore.

You can either remove the incoming replication tasks first and recreate the protection task for VM like the following GUI.change storage policy 1

Or you can evacuate the replications from the datastore at once, you apply an alternative storage policy to all incoming replications on the datastore. Please check the official documentation here:

  1. Log in to the management interface of the Cloud Replication Management Appliance.
    1. In a Web browser, go to https://Appliance-IP-Address/ui/admin.
    2. Select Appliance login or SSO login and enter the root or the single sign-on user credentials.
    3. Click Login.
  2. In the left pane, click Datastores.select datastore
  3. To see a filter showing the replications that are placed on the highlighted datastore, click Preview.
  4. previewSelect a local datastore that lists a replications counter and click Evacuate.evacuate
  5. In the Evacuate datastore window, select the destination storage policy for all incoming replications residing on the datastore and click Apply.

evacuate selection

  • Reset current storage policyapply the current storage policy to each matching replication.
    • After removing or adding datastores to the storage policy, this option can move the replication replica files, to make the matching replications compliant with their storage policy.
  • Any store all the replications to all the shared datastores to which the Any storage policy is applied.
  • pVDC Storage policy apply the selected storage policy to all matching replications. If the pVDC Storage policy is not exposed to a tenant data center, the replications of this tenant remain placed on the datastore.

The “reset” option is used, when you don’t want to change the storage policy, but you want to evacuate the datastore. If that’s what you need – you first exclude the datastore from the respective storage policy, then reset this storage policy, and the replica files will move to the other datastores, compliant with the respective storage policy.

VMware Cloud Director Availability applies the selected storage policy and starts evacuating the incoming replications and replica files from the selected local datastore in the cloud site.

You can track the progress of the Change storage profiles task by clicking System Tasks in the left pane.system

Notes:

  • Evacuating a datastore might take several hours to complete and depends on the amount of data to be transferred.
  • Evacuating datastore clusters is not supported. Such datastores are not listed, even when used as the replications destination storage policy.

Leveraging this feature, cloud providers can easily perform the maintenance job to their underlining storage resources, to conclude this blog, I encourage you to start to test this new feature, please feedback me in case you encountered any problem, thanks for reading and see you in the next blog!