Originally posted by: YanliangQiao

Storage Replication Adapter(SRA) is a plug-in for VMware Site Recovery Manager(SRM).  It extends SRM capabilities and offer customer a array-based replication across sites in private cloud environments.

IBM SRA Work Mode

CSS SRA team is responsible for SVC/Storwize Family SRA and DS8K SRA. All IBM SRAs I mentioned in this blog is about these two SRAs.

To meet different customer's IT policies, SVC_SRA and DS8K SRA provide two work mode: Non_preconfigured mode and Preconfigured mode:

• Non_preconfigured Mode requires SRM-Admin as a user in storage Administrator Group, which has access to create volumes, create flashcopies, and map volumes. In this mode, SRA will automatically create flashcopies and map the volumes to hosts during Test Recovery and Recovery operations, it will also automatically unmap the volumes and delete the flashcopies during Cleanup or Reprotect operations. Comparing with Preconfigued mode, it is obviously a more efficient way to consume storage pool.
• Preconfigured Mode requires SRM-Admin as a user in storage Copy Operator Group, which do not have access to create or map volumes. So Storage-Admin need to create flashcopies and map volumes in advance(before running any operations in SRM), which means that the test flashcopy volumes consume the storage pool capacity all the time.

The initial Configurations for two work modes are shown below:

Non_preconfigured Mode is always recommended for the customer, because

• Non_preconfigured Mode offers a more efficient way to consume storage pool
• Non_preconfigured Mode is less manual operations required, and easier to configure