An Introduction to Site Recovery

Introduction

VMware’s Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) for the AWS cloud offering is a part of VMware’s Site Recovery portfolio. DRaaS enables customers to protect and recover applications without the requirement for a dedicated secondary site. It is delivered, sold, supported, maintained and managed by VMware as an on-demand service. IT teams manage their cloud-based resources with familiar VMware tools—without the difficulties of learning new skills or utilizing new tools.

About VMware Site Recovery

VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is a business continuity and disaster recovery solution that helps you plan, test, and run the recovery of virtual machines between sites either designed as protected and recovery or bi-directional sites.

VMware Cloud on AWS integrates VMware’s flagship compute, storage, and network virtualization products — VMware vSphere, VMware vSAN, and VMware NSX®—along with VMware vCenter Server® management. VMware SRM is an addon made available as Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) with VMC on AWS. SRM works in conjunction with VMware vSphere Replication to automate the process of migrating, recovering, testing, re-protecting, and failing-back virtual machine workloads.

SRM servers coordinate the operations of the VMware vCenter Server™ at two sites. Virtual machine data is configured to be replicated to the other site which can be used later in starting copies of protected virtual machines on the second site during planned maintenance or when a disaster strikes.

Site Recovery can be configured in two modes:

  • Customer’s data center and an SDDC deployed on VMware Cloud on AWS
  • Between two SDDCs deployed to different AWS availability zones or regions. This option allows VMware Site Recovery to provide a fully VMware managed and maintained Disaster Recovery (DR) solution.

VMware Site Recovery utilizes VMware Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication. For the VMware Cloud on AWS instance, this software is automatically installed and configured by VMware when the add-on is enabled.

For the customer site, the customer can install VMware Site Recovery Manager on a Microsoft Windows server or deploy as an appliance (starting With SRM 8.1). vSphere Replication is deployed as an appliance.

VMware Site Recovery utilizes vSphere Replication for transferring data between sites. The following requirements must be met on the customer site for installation:

  • VMware vCenter
  • One or more vSphere ESXi hosts
  • Infrastructure services like DNS, DHCP and Active Directory, must be in place at both the protected and recovery sites.

See the Compatibility matrix for detailed requirements and version compatibility.

 

Features and Benefits

  • Lower Total Cost of Ownership on recovery site datacenter with a DR site service
  • On-Demand DRaaS that works regardless of complexity
  • Protect your most sensitive workloads
  • Recover fast and minimize downtime
  • Eliminate manual process with automated orchestration of site failover and failback with a single-click
  • Application-agnostic protection eliminates the need for app-specific point solutions
  • Frequent, non-disruptive testing of recovery plans ensures highly predictable recovery objectives
  • Enhanced, easy to use, consolidated protection workflow simplifies replicating and protecting virtual machines
  • Recovery plans are available on the HTML-based UI
  • vSphere Replication integration delivers VM-centric, replication that eliminates dependence on a particular type of storage
  • Flexible versioning allows for easier upgrades and ongoing management

 


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