The adoption of virtualization technology has made the IT infrastructure faster, smarter, and more efficient. The ratio of businesses migrating to virtual infrastructure has been rapidly increasing. Until the evolution of virtualization and hypervisor, the operation of IT continued with several physical units employed as server/workstation each tied to the single operating system. Whereas in the virtual infrastructure, the hypervisor provides the virtualization capabilities, that lets you create multiple Virtual Machines (VM) onto a single piece of hardware and allows you to aggregate the resources of the host hardware to each VMs.
Data protection is the most important aspect that every business needs to pay attention to their survival. A data protection solution must be able to deliver seamless business continuity along with complete IT infrastructure protection for virtual as well as physical systems.
Now, let’s take a look at the virtual infrastructure protection and why it is important.
A virtual downtime can cost more. for example, multiple workloads might be affected at once if something happens to the host and this will obviously affect multiple users and the productivity. Hence, it is vital to implement a data protection solution for virtual machines.
Also, when it comes to virtual infrastructure data protection, it is best to choose a solution that provides a wide range of data protection for any virtual environments like VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xen, RHEV, Linux KVM etc. This is helpful if your business runs a multi-Hypervisor environment then a single solution can offer protection for all your virtual workloads running on different hypervisors.
In this post, we will look into the procedures of how to protect your virtual infrastructure from disaster.
You can protect your virtual environment with these three strategies in place.
VM Replication
VM Replication allows your business critical VMs to get up and running instantly after a disaster without waiting to perform the recovery steps. This helps you to achieve business continuity and ensures high availability of your critical VMs.
Backup and Recovery
Create copy of your VM data. The backup data copy provides protection for your infrastructure against data loss and is always recommended to store it in a separate storage systems or mediums like Disk/Tape. Then, recover the data to the same/different location, which can be used as an alternative to the lost data.
Disaster Recovery as a Service
DRaaS lets you create and store redundant copies of data in multiple locations and is considered as one of the best DR plans. With DRaaS, you will get the capabilities like instant boot of VM’s, recovery of the entire VM/Apps/data either locally or in the cloud.
Vembu BDR Suite delivers all three strategies.
Vembu BDR suite is an all-inclusive solution designed to meet the data protection needs of businesses irrespective of their size and type. It delivers complete data protection for Physical as well as Virtual workloads and cloud-based SaaS applications (G Suite & Office 365).
Concerning about the protection of the virtual environment, Vembu provides backup and disaster recovery support for broad range of hypervisors. It offers agentless backup solution for VMs running on VMware & Hyper-V and agent-based backup solution for VMs running on other hypervisors like Linux KVM, Citrix Xen, RHEV, Acropolis, OpenStack etc.
Try Vembu BDR Suite. Check out the installation procedure of Vembu BDR Suite Video tutorial.
VM REPLICATION
Vembu VM Replication is an agentless solution designed specifically for VMware vSphere ESXi VMs. It lets you create a redundant copy of VMs on another ESXi host, in a ready-to-start state and allows you to failover immediately from the source to the replicated VM at times of disaster.
Agentless VM Replication
Vembu offers agentless replication thereby allowing you to replicate the VMs without installing agent inside them. Vembu VM replication supports both onsite replication and offsite replication for DR purposes.
- Enter the source ESXi host credentials and choose the VMs you wish to replicate
- You can either replicate single VM or multiple VMs from one host to another ESXi host
- Then, configure the disaster recovery server for VM replication i.e, provide the target ESXi host credentials where the copy of the source VM needs to be created
Vembu assures RPO & RTO of less than 15 mins
Vembu lets you schedule the replication as frequent as every 15 mins i.e, the changes made in the source VM can be copied to the target VM in DR site as per the frequency scheduled. The frequency can be set even hourly/daily/weekly.
Also, Vembu lets you achieve lesser RTO through the Failover and Failback operations.
Performing Failover will instantly turn on the replicated VM in the DR site. Thus, the operations from source VM will now be switched to the VM in the DR site and you can immediately start working on it.
Performing Failback lets you recover the replicated VM along with failover data to the source host or another host in the production site. This will allow you to resume its ongoing operations and works normally like the production machine.
Other Major Features of Vembu VM Replication
- CBT enabled incremental replication
- Application Aware replication
- Network Mapping – Configure the source and target VM networks to map the production site and DR site networks
- IP-Remapping – This helps you if the IP addressing scheme in the production site differs from that in the DR site
Vembu VM replication designed for critical VMs will thus enable you to keep the business data always online and lets you easily access the data and the entire VM immediately after a disaster.
Check out the detailed configuration procedure of Vembu VMware Replication in the video tutorial.
BACKUP & RECOVERY
Vembu provides reliable data protection offering Agentless and Agent-based Backup solutions for the virtualized environments.
- Vembu VMBackup is designed to protect VMs running on VMware & Hyper-V and lets you perform host-level backups
- The Distributed clients – Vembu ImageBackup & Vembu NetworkBackup lets you protect the VMs running on other hypervisors
Host-Level Backups
The backups can be directly configured from the BDR server console.
- Add the host credentials of ESXi Host/vCenter server to configure image-level backup of VMs running on VMware environment
- Similarly, add the Hyper-V host credentials to configure image-level backups of VMs running on Hyper-V environment
- You can either choose all the VMs running on the host else you can selectively choose the VMs for backup
Vembu assures an RPO and RTO of 15mins
- Vembu offers near Continuous Data Protection for VMs that are configured for Image-level Backups using agentless & agent-based methods, and lets you configure the backups as frequent as every 15 mins
- Also, Vembu ensures restoration process to be completed within 15 mins through its multiple instant recovery options like Quick VM Recovery, Instant File-Level Recovery & Disk Management Mount
One of the best features is, you can instantly start your VMs directly from the backup storage on the VMware/Hyper-V/KVM hypervisor irrespective of the native hypervisor. This lets you restore the entire VM within few minutes without moving the data.
Other Major Features of Vembu VMBackup
- CBT enabled incremental backups
- Application Aware Backups
- Advanced Retention Policies
- Backup-Level Encryption
You can perform and manage all the Backup and Recovery operations from a single console.
Check out the detailed configuration procedure of VMware backup and restore Video tutorial.
Check out the detailed configuration procedure of Hyper-V backup and restore Video tutorial.
DISASTER RECOVERY as a SERVICE
Vembu offers two different disaster recovery products for Virtual Environment.
- Vembu OffsiteDR
- Vembu CloudDR
This lets you have an additional copy of your VM Backups on remote location or in the cloud for data redundancy and disaster recovery purpose.
Vembu OffsiteDR
- This lets you set up Disaster Recovery location in a remote site for your virtual environment
- The VM Backup data can be replicated from the on-premises to the remote location
- Vembu assures an RTO of 15 mins or less. The VM restoration can be performed from the remote location to the virtual hosts running in the same environment
Vembu CloudDR
- This lets you set up Disaster Recovery site in the cloud for your virtual environment
- The VM Backup data can be replicated from on-premises to Vembu Cloud
- You can restore your data from anywhere at any time from the cloud
You can have your own disaster recovery policies i.e, Have your data in your remote branch office so that the data lies within your organization, else you can opt for the Vembu Cloud and have the data online in your geographic region.
Check out the detailed configuration procedure of Vembu OffsiteDR Video tutorial.
Check out the detailed configuration procedure of Vembu CloudDR Video tutorial.
Conclusion
With one solution – Vembu BDR Suite, organizations can now protect their entire virtual datacenters and can start running their VMs within minutes in the event of the disaster which eventually minimizes the downtime faced by the businesses. Thus, embracing Vembu Backup, Recovery, Replication and DRaaS for Virtual Infrastructure ensures seamless business continuity and high availability for business-critical VMs.
Do you want to try Vembu BDR Suite? Then, download the Vembu BDR Suite now and start protecting your VMs across multiple hypervisors with a single solution.
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