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AWS Solutions Library

Guidance for Disaster Recovery with VMware on AWS

Attain recovery point objectives with rapid failover and failback for VMware workloads

Overview

This Guidance illustrates a disaster recovery approach for using VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR) on AWS. A virtual appliance protects machines using a combination of VMware snapshot technology, including an orchestrator that manages the disaster recovery plan within AWS and a VMware Scale-Out File System that stores replicas of the virtual machines.

In a disaster event, VCDR can recover protected virtual machines, especially if a Pilot Light mode is pre-established. The Pilot Light mode maintains a scaled-down warm standby environment, enabling faster recovery of critical applications. When the primary site is restored, VCDR orchestrates efficient failback, minimizing replication time.

How it works

This architecture diagram shows how you can build a disaster recovery environment on AWS using VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery, a VMware-delivered disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) offering that protects on-premises vSphere and VMware Cloud on AWS workloads.

Download the architecture diagram

Well-Architected Pillars

The architecture diagram above is an example of a Solution created with Well-Architected best practices in mind. To be fully Well-Architected, you should follow as many Well-Architected best practices as possible.

This Guidance combines compute, network, and storage capabilities to reduce the operational overhead associated with maintaining on-premises VMware clusters. It replaces the undifferentiated heavy lifting of manually configuring, managing, and maintaining clusters with a packaged approach that includes support and maintenance from both VMware and AWS. VMware delivers scheduled Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) updates and emergency software patches with notifications, as well as auto-remediation of hardware failures.

Read the Operational Excellence whitepaper

This Guidance lets you deploy a Recovery SDDC in the VMware cloud (or add an existing SDDC for recovery) to use for recovery and testing of your recovery plans and for ransomware recovery. You can add hosts, clusters, new networks, request public IP addresses, configure NAT rules, and also delete the recovery SDDC. In the event of a disaster or ransomware attack, you can recover virtual machines from your protected site to your recovery SDDC. You can recover from the disaster when your production site is ready. For ransomware, you can repair the infected virtual machines in the isolated recovery SDDC environment and restore clean and validated virtual machines back to a production site.

Read the Security whitepaper

This Guidance outlines the use of a dedicated, single-tenant cloud infrastructure supporting multiple VMware SDDCs. In this configuration, computing resources are exclusively allocated to a single customer or tenant, with up to 16 hosts for each cluster. These SDDCs are delivered using the latest high-performance computing and storage resources, optimized for high I/O workloads and featuring low-latency Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe)-based Solid-State Drives (SSDs).

Read the Reliability whitepaper

With this Guidance, you have the ability to democratize advanced technologies through the management of the SDDC. This includes patch management and secure operations of the software stack, helping you and your team focus on your application layer rather than the software and underlying infrastructure.

Read the Performance Efficiency whitepaper

This Guidance includes flexible storage options, such as a VMware Virtual SAN (vSAN) storage approach built on Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) instance storage, allowing you to manage storage costs for your application. It also provides advanced data services like quality of service, snapshots, and third-party data protection, optimizing storage utilization and costs. Additionally, it supports custom-sized virtual machines and VMware-compatible operating systems. Lastly, the single-tenant bare metal AWS infrastructure can provide cost advantages over shared virtual resources by delivering dedicated computing and storage.

Read the Cost Optimization whitepaper

The AWS data centers that host the services in this Guidance are designed to offer a lower carbon footprint compared to traditional, on-premises data centers. In addition, this Guidance allows you to deploy a fully configured VMware SDDC cluster in under a few hours. Lastly, you can scale host capacity up and down in minutes, effectively minimizing the environmental impact of your workloads by dynamically adapting capacity based on demand.

Read the Sustainability whitepaper

Disclaimer

The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.