As organizations plan hybrid cloud strategies, disaster recovery (DR) is a vital consideration to ensure business continuity in the event of a disaster. Some organizations have been intimidated by the cost and complexity of traditional DR and do not have a recovery solution in place. These organizations can now use the VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and VMware Cloud on AWS to implement DR in a cost-effective way.
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What does this solution do?
Organizations need to consider the architectural best practices for implementing DR using VMware Cloud on AWS. By combining the trusted and proven VMware DR technologies, such as VMware Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication, with the massive scalability, availability, speed, and cost benefits of the AWS Cloud, organizations can realize the benefits of cost reduction, operational simplification, and faster time to protection for disaster recovery and DR testing.
VMware Cloud on AWS offers four levels of DR support with increasing complexity and decreasing RPO/RTO, including Backup and Restore, Pilot Light, Warm Standby in AWS, and Hot Standby Active/Active. We explore the Backup and Restore use case below. Consult with your AWS account rep to identify the most appropriate DR solution to deploy for your needs.
Backup and Restore
At the simplest form of DR, a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) can be ready to start deploying workloads within 120 minutes to support an on-demand disaster recovery. The ability to spin up resources on-demand is a cost-effective approach preventing idle resources waiting for use.
On-premise backups are configured with backup repositories that can extend to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). A VMware Cloud on AWS certified backup is required. The backup data gets offloaded to the S3 bucket based on a zero-day value move policy which dictates the operational restore window.
From the diagram above:
Amazon Route 53 handles DNS requests to the primary data center.
The Backup & Replication server backs up workloads to the backup repository.
Local data from the backup repository offloads to the Capacity Tier in Amazon S3 through AWS Direct Connect or the internet.
The recovery process launches and configures the VMware SDDC cluster in the designated AWS recovery region through web portal automation scripts using vRA or vCLI.
A new backup repository instance deployed and configured within the newly-created SDDC.
Previous data stored in S3 is detected. The initial metadata and archive index sync is executed.
Workloads recovered into the SDDC cluster and services are brought back online.
Amazon Route 53 record setting updates to resolve requests to the new secondary data center in the cloud.