Pure Storage ActiveDR Lab

Pure Storage's FlashArray is a Unified Storage Platform offering Block and File Services. Pure's ActiveDR replication feature can be used to protect the block and/or file data running on a FlashArray by replicating the data to a second FlashArray in a near real-time/continuous data replication way when synchronous replication is not required or data centers are too far apart to meet latency needs.

In this lab, you will walk through the simple configuration of ActiveDR on a FlashArray along with setting up replication to a second FlashArray through both the GUI and the CLI.  You will also have the option to go through some DR scenarios to see how simple it is to perform a test failover, along with an actual failover and fail-back for the VMs running in a VMware datastore.

In this lab users will gain a general understanding of Pure Storage's ActiveDR capabilities by performing the following activities: 

• Initial setup and prep of the environment.
• Setup and configuration of a ActiveDR on two FlashArrays.
• Test the ActiveDR failover
• Run through a planned site failover

This lab is backed by an environment with the following components (of which not all will be used for this specific lab):

• 2 x Pure Storage FlashArrays
• 2 x ESXi Servers (Site 1 and Site 2)
• 1 x vCenter Server
• 1 x Pure on-premises mediator VM
• 1 x Jumphost/AD/DNS Windows Server
• 1 x Linux Jumpbox Server
• 1 x Gitlab Server
• 1 x Tower Server
• multiple Windows and Linux VMs running on each ESXi server