AWS Marketplace

Implementing Druva Phoenix for backup and disaster recovery of your VM workloads

In this blog post, I will show you how to find Druva Phoenix in AWS Marketplace and how to configure cloud-based backup and recovery for VMware vSphere. I’ll also provide an overview of disaster recovery capabilities in Druva Phoenix. Finally, I’ll show how to configure failover and failback for VMware to enable fast recovery of business-critical workloads in the event of a disaster or outage.

Using Druva Phoenix on AWS for backup and disaster recovery

I’m seeing more customers asking for a flexible and scalable data center backup and disaster recovery solution to ensure business continuity and resiliency. More importantly, they require a solution that protects both on-premises workloads and cloud workloads and applications. Druva securely stores customer data in the Druva Cloud Platform using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage tiers.

Druva Phoenix, Druva’s data center backup and disaster recovery (DR) solution, is a SaaS solution built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It protects workloads including Windows and Linux servers, NAS, VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs), and VMware Cloud on AWS. It also protects workloads such as SQL and Oracle running in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and AWS cloud file storage. AWS cloud file storage includes Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) and Amazon FSx for Windows file servers.

Prerequisites

Solution overview

Step 1: Subscribe to Druva Phoenix in AWS Marketplace

  1. Go to https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace.
  2. In the search bar at the top center, enter Druva Phoenix.
  3. Select Druva Phoenix: Cloud Backup & Recovery for Data Center.
  4. Choose Continue to subscribe. You will receive an email with instance details, along with the credentials on the email address used to subscribe to Druva Phoenix service on AWS Marketplace.
  5. Log in to the Druva Cloud Platform at https://login.druva.com/login using the credentials from the email in step 1.4.

Step 2: Configure VMware VMs for data protection

Druva Phoenix uses VMware backup proxies to back up VMs both in your VMware on-premises infrastructure as well as your VMware Cloud setup.

To configure your VMware VMs for backup:

  1. Deploy the first backup proxy and register the VMware setup.
  2. Configure your virtual machines for backup.

Step 3: Configure disaster recovery for your VMware workload

First, review the prerequisites: Virtual machine prerequisites if you are using Phoenix AWS Proxy version 4.8.0 or later.

Then, set up the Druva AWS proxy. The Druva AWS proxy is an Amazon EC2 instance that runs in your AWS account. This AWS proxy orchestrates the data transfer from the Druva Cloud Platform to your account for the disaster recovery (DR) restore operation. It also orchestrates DR failover and DR failback operations. To set up your proxy, do the following:

  1. Log in into Druva Cloud Platform at https://login.druva.com/login using the credentials from step 1.4.
  2. From the top navigation bar, choose Phoenix.
  3. Choose the Organization where you configured the backups in Step 2 from the All Organization dropdown.
  4. On the Druva Phoenix organization dashboard top navigation, choose Disaster Recovery.
  5. Follow these steps to set up the AWS Proxy.

 Step 4: Create a disaster recovery plan

 Using a DR plan, you can preconfigure aspects of disaster recovery for a single-click failover in the event of a disaster. To create a DR plan:

  1. In the Druva Phoenix console left sidebar, choose the DR Plans tab. This opens the DR Plans page, which lists the DR plans configured with your organization.
  2. On the top right corner of the page, choose Create New DR Plan.
  3. Follow these steps to configure the DR plan.

With every VM backup, Druva Phoenix runs prerequisite checks and provides automated status updates. These updates notify you if the VMs have successfully cleared the checks and are DR ready.

Congratulations; your configuration for VMware backup as well as disaster recovery into your AWS account is complete!

Triggering failover and failback instances

Failover is a process that occurs during a disaster. It is the process that avoids an outage by converting the DR backup copy into a live Amazon EC2 instance. Failback is the process by which that backup instance returns traffic to the original VMs after the disaster has been resolved. Here is how to trigger failover and failback instances using Druva Phoenix.

Triggering failover instances

In the event of an actual disaster or for testing purposes, DR failover recovers VMs in the AWS account based on the configuration and failover settings specified in your DR plan. When failover occurs, Druva Phoenix spins up the Amazon EC2 instances from the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots during failover.

To trigger a failover:

  1. In the Druva management console left navigation bar, open the Select DR Plan dropdown list and choose a DR plan.
  2. In the left navigation bar, on the Overview tab, choose Failover. Review the VMs and recovery plan.
  3. Follow these steps to trigger failover.

The system displays the successful failover initiation message for the selected VMs. You can view the status of the failover request for the VMs on the Failover Instances tab.

Triggering failback instances

When the outage issues are resolved, you can failback the Amazon EC2 instances to an alternate location in your virtualization infrastructure without any data loss.

To trigger a failback:

  1. In the Druva management console left navigation bar, open the Select DR Plan dropdown list and choose a DR plan.
  2. In the left navigation bar, choose Failover instances.
  3. Filter the instances you want to failback. You can filter by:
    • Instances configured for production or test failover.
    • Instances in running, stopped, or terminated state.
  1. Select the instances you want to failback.
  2. Follow these steps to trigger a failback.

Conclusion

In this blog post, I showed you how to subscribe to Druva Phoenix from AWS Marketplace and outlined the steps to log in to the Druva Phoenix console. Additionally, I showed how to protect VMware VMs by configuring policies for backup and cloud-based disaster recovery.

Last, I showed how to failover VMs into your AWS account as Amazon EC2 instances in case of an actual disaster or for testing purposes. I also showed the steps to failback these Amazon EC2 instances into your on-premises and VMware Cloud setup.

For more information, find Druva Phoenix in AWS Marketplace.

To see how Druva Phoenix works in action, watch this 4-minute demo.

The content and opinions in this post are those of the third-party author, and AWS is not responsible for the content or accuracy of this post.

About the author

Jude Daniel Druva AWS MarketplaceWith over six years of experience working at Druva, Jude brings product strategy, market experience and customer intelligence to his role as product manager for Druva Phoenix. Jude carries a breadth of knowledge and experience across operating systems, database servers, AWS, backup and storage technologies, and virtualization technologies.