VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery is now Available

VMware has announced the availability of VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery, based on the recent acquisition of Datrium. This solution is currently VMware’s on-demand disaster recovery (DR) offering, intended to be delivered as a simple and easy-to-use SaaS solution, leveraging cloud economics benefits. VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery will enable IT and business continuity teams to easily and cost-effectively resume critical business operations into the cloud (VMware Cloud on AWS) after a disaster event in their on-premises environment.

Read More – VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery Video Demo

VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery

In the middle of this year 2020, VMware announced Datrium’s acquisition, expanding its VMware Site Recovery disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), which now is offered with Datrium’s world-class cost-optimized DRaaS solution. This acquisition was a significant move forward from VMware to help its customers build hybrid clouds. The service combines the consistent infrastructure and operations of VMware Cloud with Datrium DRaaS, reducing the cost and complexity of business continuity.

VMware Cloud DR extends the current VMware Disaster Recovery solutions based on the VMware Cloud on AWS platform and leverages existing VMware vSphere on-premises capabilities. VMware breaks down this solution into cloud-based services and on-premises components.

Cloud-based services include two new components, SaaS Orchestrator and Scale-out Cloud File System. While for the on-premises components, it is the DRaaS Connector component.

SaaS Orchestrator provides a centralized management dashboard for connecting on-premises Protected Sites to the cloud-based DR resources, manages the scheduled Protection Groups operations securing data to cloud-based storage, and orchestrates DR plans for testing or actual failover. The SaaS-based management console will simplify DR maintenance operations, eliminating the lifecycle burden of managing the DR software. The Orchestrator also directly creates and manages the VMC SDDC, further simplifying cloud site management when needed.
Scale-out Cloud File System provides a cloud-based file system datastore for holding multiple point-in-time copies of the protected VMs in native VM format. It also enables the quick recovery from a Live Mount connection to the SDDC when needed for DR. The ability to power on VMs without waiting to fully rehydrate data from cloud storage to VMware Cloud on AWS, via a live mount NFS volume to the ESX hosts in VMware Cloud on AWS provides even faster recovery.
DRaaS Connector supports OVA deployment and provides the basic vSphere snapshot and change block tracking mechanisms to transport on-premises VM data to the Scale-out Cloud File System for subsequent DR use.

From the VMware Cloud DR’s dashboard, it is provided overall details of the systems and simple navigation points to protect on-premises sites (Protected Sites), with Protection group policies and DR plans to automate the recovery tasks. These are three key DR solution constructs. Protected Sites enables the protection of VMs in that site to the Scale-out Cloud File System. Protection Groups provides the policy-based definitions for determining which VMs are selected, when they are protected (snapshot), and how long (retention) their recovery point is kept in the cloud for potential DR use. And finally, DR Plans provides a site to site plans that capture the organizational details of the VMs that need to failover, the order of events, and any special handling (e.g., IP address changes), and notifications.

VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery UI

The new components of the VMware Cloud DR product ties to the key constructs used to manage the overall DR solution; explained in the diagram below. Customers will be using a familiar VMware infrastructure on both sides of the DR setup – vCenter for the on-premises site and SDDC vCenter for VMC on AWS cloud site. With VMware Cloud DR, VMware aims to empower customers to manage both the cloud DR and production sites with VMware vCenter. At the same time, it retains access to familiar vSphere constructs – such as clusters, resource pools, datastores, virtual switches, and port groups – following a failover.

VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery Architecture