Organizations today using underlying hypervisor technology to run production workloads have a wealth of technologies available that facilitate disaster recovery. VMware vSphere has many great disaster recovery technologies and products that allow organizations many DR options when building and implementing their DR plans. VMware provides tools and technologies today that allow organizations to not be bound by location or physical infrastructure and to have myriad options when it comes to recovering mission critical workloads. Let’s take a look at the current VMware vSphere Private-Cloud Disaster Recovery technologies and products that organizations can take advantage of in building a successful disaster recovery plan. We will also note a few limitations of these.
VMware vSphere Private-Cloud Disaster Recovery
VMware provides multiple options that allow effective Private-Cloud Disaster Recovery. We will take a look at the following:
- VMware vSAN
- VMware Data Protection
- VMware vSphere Replication
- VMware Site Recovery Manager
How do the above-mentioned technologies and products facilitate effective Disaster Recovery?
VMware vSAN
These days, hyper-converged infrastructure allows organizations to be agile and abstracts the datacenter away from the underlying physical hardware. A key component of VMware’s software defined datacenter is VMware vSAN. VMware vSAN allows clustering server hard disk and solid-state drives in to a logical volume that is flash-optimized and highly resilient to failure. VMware vSAN was specifically designed for virtual machines. The benefits of VMware vSAN include the following:
- Extends vSphere capabilities to the storage layer
- Allows bolstering security with native HCI encryption
- Use cost effective x86 servers
- Creates a much simpler way to manage storage at the vSphere level
- Easily scale out and stretch storage across geographic regions
VMware vSAN Hyper-Converged storage (courtesy of VMware)
The new “stretched cluster” in VMware vSAN extends the vSAN cluster from a single data site to two sites for higher level of availability and site wide DR.
All of the above advantages help organizations to reduce their total cost of ownership and become much more agile with deploying infrastructure.
VMware Data Protection
VMware Data Protection or VDP is VMware’s backup and recovery solution for vSphere environments. It provides image-level virtual machine backups to disk. It is also application-aware and able to provide application-aware backups for applications like Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft Sharepoint. Backups are compressed and WAN-efficient and also provides encrypted backup data replication.
VMware Data Protection has been improved with every release but has had some limitations that organizations had to deal with in the various versions. It is important to note that VMware Data Protection is now end of life. VMware vSphere 6.5 is the last version that will include the VDP product.
VMware vSphere Replication
VMware vSphere Replication provides asynchronous replication for vSphere virtual machines and is integrated with vCenter server. It allows organizations to enable data protection and replication for virtual machines within a single site, between two sites, as well as data center migration. With vSphere Replication, organizations can have access to really nice replications features included with vSphere including:
- Free
- RPOs from 5 minutes to 24 hours
- Multiple points in time recovery
- VSS enabled
- Linux file quiescing
- Cross-site disaster recovery
- VMware vSAN compatible
While vSphere Replication is a free product from VMware that is included with vSphere, it does have a few limitations that must be realized. In particular the following limitations need to be noted:
- No automated failover support
- No automated re-IP addressing virtual machines
- No scheduling of replication tasks
- Requires Site Recovery Manager to perform more advanced tasks
VMware Site Recovery Manager
VMware Site Recovery Manager is VMware’s product that provides the automation piece to VMware’s Disaster Recovery capabilities. It allows policy-based management and the creation, testing, and orchestration of recovery plans that are managed through the vSphere Web client.
Benefits include:
- Application-agnostic protection
- Automated orchestration of site failover and failback with single click
- Centralized management of recovery plans
- Testing of recovery plans
- vSAN integration
- Supports array-based replication
- VM-centric and eliminates storage hardware dependence
VMware vSphere SRM provides a powerful feature set, however, organizations should note the following:
- It is not free
- Configuration and Setup is not a minor undertaking
- It is yet another product that must be integrated within vCenter to provide disaster recovery features and functionality
VMware Private-Cloud Disaster Recovery Considerations
VMware offers a good selection of products that allow organizations to have a data protection solution out of the box. However, it is important to note that to have a fully featured VMware vSphere Private-Cloud Disaster Recovery solution, it requires multiple VMware products to make this happen. Additionally, vSphere Data Protection is now end of life. VMware has made clear they will continue to support and develop the APIs so that third-party vendors can make use of them, but they will no longer be developing their own data protection solution so this will leave a major gap in native disaster recovery within vSphere using native products. VMware vSphere Replication and Site Recovery Manager are still offerings from VMware and cover a wide range of use cases to facilitate disaster recovery.
Organizations do well to look at fully featured data protection solutions that cover the functionality contained between the portfolio of VMware vSphere products, all under a “single pane of glass”. Vembu BDR Suite allows you to provide the industry standard 3-2-1 backup strategy with native backup, replication, backup copy, tape, and cloud support. Additionally, Vembu BDR Suite is not limited to VMware technology and can protect multiple hypervisors, public cloud, as well as physical workloads.
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