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disaster recovery

Announcing VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery! (VCDR)

Duncan Epping · Sep 30, 2020 · 2 Comments

Most of you probably saw the announcements around the acquisition of Datrium not too long ago. One of the major drivers for that acquisition was the Disaster Recovery solution which Datrium developed. This week at VMworld this service was announced as a new VMware disaster recovery option. The service is named VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery, and it provides the ability to replicate workloads from on-prem into cloud storage, and recover from cloud storage into VMware Cloud on AWS! The three key pillars of the service are ease of use, fast recovery, cloud economics.

The solution is extensively covered in three VMworld sessions (HCI2876, HCI2886, HCI2865). I have watched all three and will provide a short summary here. What capabilities does VMware Cloud DR (VCDR) provide and why is VMware heading into this space?

The why was well explained by Mark Chuang in HCI2876, customers are saying that:

  • “DR is very complex and expensive to manage, and I can’t add IT Headcount”
  • “Our data grows 10-15% every year, with physical DR it is hard to accommodate the growth in the datacenter to meet the needs”
  • “We only test full DR once a year because it is disruptive. Any time there is a major change, how can we know it still works? It is a huge issue!”

I guess that makes it clear why VMware is interested in this space, it is a huge problem for customers and the solution typically comes at a high cost. VMware has always been in the business of solving complex solutions in preferably a simple way, and that is exactly what VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery delivers, a simple solution at a relatively low cost.

So what does it bring from a feature/functionality stance?

it all starts with cloud economics, to which ease-of-use also contributes, in my opinion. VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery is super simple to configure and it replicates data to “cheap and deep” cloud storage. This ensures that the cost can be kept low, and note that all of the typical cost that comes with cloud storage (network etc) are all included in the service offering by VMware. The challenge however typically with cloud storage is that it is relatively slow when it comes to restoring, but this is where the “on-demand” capabilities come into play. VMware Cloud DR provides the ability to instantly power-on workloads through a live mount option, without the need to convert the stored data back to a VM format.

When configuring the VMware Cloud DR solutions you will need to install/configure a DRaaS Connector on-prem. This on-prem Connector connects you to the SaaS platform and will provide the required details to the SaaS Orchestrator, note that you can have multiple DRaaS connectors for resiliency and performance reasons. When the connection is configured you will then be able to create “Protection Groups” and “DR Plans”. Those who have worked with Site Recovery Manager will recognize the terms. For those who haven’t:

  • Protection Groups – These groups list the workloads which will be protected by VMware Cloud DR. Of course you can define the protection schedule, basically how many snapshots need to be shipped remote cloud storage per day/week/month.
  • DR Plans – These plans list workloads that would need to be failed over when the plan is triggered, and for instance, include the order in which the workloads need to be powered on. Also, if workloads need to get a different IP address in the cloud, then you can specify this here also.

Of course besides creating protection groups and DR plans you have the ability to test and failover the workloads in those plans, again, very similar to what Site Recovery Manager offers. Before I forget, you will have the option of course to select the snapshot you want to recover from. So you can go back to any point in time. What is unique here is that VMs are powered without (initially) moving data from cloud storage to your VMware Cloud on AWS. It basically mounts an NFS share from the SaaS platform and the scale-out file system ensures that the VMs can be instantly be powered on. After you have tested the recovery you can then decide to migrate the VMs to your SDDC, or you can of course also discard the workloads if that is something you desire. Last but not least, of course, you also have the ability to replicate back to on-prem, so that you can bring your workloads back whenever you have recovered your environment from the disaster that occurred and you are ready to run those workloads on-prem again.

Now there are many more details, but I am not going to share those in this post, I may do a couple of additional blogs at a future time. I hope the above gives a good overview of what the offering will provide. For more details, I would recommend watching the VMworld sessions on this topic (HCI2876, HCI2886, HCI2865). The last thing I want to share though is where the solution will be available, or at least what is being planned. As shown below, the offering should be available in multiple regions soon.

VMworld Reveals: Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity enhancements! (#HCI2894BU and #HBI3109BU)

Duncan Epping · Sep 4, 2019 · 1 Comment

At VMworld, various cool new technologies were previewed. In this series of articles, I will write about some of those previewed technologies. Unfortunately, I can’t cover them all as there are simply too many. This article is about enhancements in the business continuity/disaster recovery space. There were 2 sessions where futures were discussed, namely HCI2894BU and HBI3109BU. Please note that this is a brief summary of those sessions, and these are discussing a Technical Preview, these features/products may never be released, and these previews do not represent a commitment of any kind, and this feature (or it’s functionality) is subject to change. Now let’s dive into it, what can you expect for disaster recovery in the future?

The first session I watched was HCI2894BU, this was all about Site Recovery Manager. I think the most interesting part is the future support for Virtual Volumes (vVols) for Site Recovery Manager. It may sound like something simple, but it isn’t. When the version of SRM ships that supports vVols keep in mind that your vVol capable storage system also needs to support it. At day 1 HPe Nimble, HPe 3PAR and Pure Storage will support it and Dell EMC and NetApp are actively working on support. The requirements are that the storage system needs to be vVols 2.0 compliant and support VASA 3.0. Before they dove into the vVols implementation, some history was shared and the current implementation. I found it interesting to know that SRM has over 25.000 customers and has protected more than 3.000.000 workloads over the last decade.

[Read more…] about VMworld Reveals: Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity enhancements! (#HCI2894BU and #HBI3109BU)

vSphere Replication 6.5, 5 minute RPO for ALL!

Duncan Epping · Nov 16, 2016 ·

I just noticed the following in the vSphere Replication 6.5 release notes which I felt was worth sharing:

5-minute Recovery Point Objective (RPO) support for additional data store types – This version of vSphere Replication extends support for the 5 minute RPO setting to the following new data stores: VMFS 5, VMFS 6, NFS 4.1, NFS 3, VVOL and VSAN 6.5. This allows customers to replicate virtual machine workloads with an RPO setting as low as 5-minutes between these various data store options.

We have had this for vSAN in specific for a while now, but I hadn’t realized yet that we were enabling this for all sorts of datastores in this release. Definitely a great reason to move up to vSphere 6.5 and re-evaluate which VMs can do with a 5 minute RPO and use this great replication mechanism that just ships with vSphere for free! More info found in the release notes here.

If you like to know more about the 6.5 release visit this page with the links to all docs/downloads by William Lam.

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About the author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist in the Office of CTO of the Cloud Platform BU at VMware. He is a VCDX (# 007) and the author of the "vSAN Deep Dive" and the “vSphere Clustering Technical Deep Dive” series.

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