Who can protect VMware better than VMware?
VMware Live Recovery (VLR) continues to deliver robust cyber and data resiliency for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), offering unified protection and secure cyber recovery. In addition to cyber recovery capabilities, VMware Live Recovery remains a cornerstone of enterprise-grade disaster recovery orchestration across various VCF-based topologies and includes site-to-site enhanced vSphere Replication with RPOs as low as 1-minute to support mission-critical applications. VMware Live Recovery is also integrated with the VMware vSAN ESA storage data protection capabilities. The increasingly tighter integration between VLR and core VCF components such as vSAN sets us apart and further drives platform-level value for our customers.
With the latest release of VMware Cloud Foundation, several key improvements are introduced into the VMware Live Recovery solution, which include:
- VLR Appliance – Simpler Deployment and Management of Services
- VMware Cloud Foundation Integration – Better Access to Data Protection Data
- Better Protection Group and Recovery Plan Integration with vSAN Data Protection
- Cyber Recovery – Enable On-Premises Scenarios – Increase Data Sovereignty
VLR Appliance – Simpler Deployment and Management of Services
Customers are now able to manage all their recovery operations using a single VLR appliance. This update enables a single, combined, easily installed and manageable appliance to simplify and improve solution lifecycle management across multiple protection services.
The protection and recovery services that have been consolidated into this new converged appliance are:
- vSphere-based enhanced replication from site to site
- vSAN-based snapshots at a specific (source / target) vSAN ESA site
- Site Recovery automation and orchestration
This VLR Appliance release is available to all customers with VLR subscription licenses as well as legacy SRM perpetual licenses with valid SNS (software and support), or term-based subscription. This new appliance can be installed on the vCenter server to converge previously installed appliances (as shown here):
For deployment considerations, the VLR appliance comes in two variants – one is for the primary combined appliance, and one is for an add-on site recovery service appliance for handling more advanced disaster recovery orchestration configurations such as shared recovery sites. For more details and system requirements, please refer to the documentation for VMware Live Recovery system requirements.
It’s important to note that the new VLR appliance will only be the only version compatible with VCF but will additionally support older ESX and vCenter versions (8.0 U3b+, 8.0 U2d+) to enable appropriate cross-site and backwards version compatibly needed as customers move to the new VCF platform. As always, it’s good practice to check the current VMware Products Interoperability tool before making any changes or upgrades – in this case we compare VMware Live Site Recovery and VMware Cloud Foundation Components.
Enhanced vSphere Replication, now part of the unified VLR appliance deployment methods, enables a more scalable and efficient replication capability to enable RPOs as low as 1-minute. It’s important to note that as part of this release, the Enhanced vSphere Replication service is now the default and only supported site-to-site vSphere Replication configuration for VMs. For sites that are using older versions of vSphere Replication as part of their disaster recovery solution, this release will require the upgrade to Enhanced vSphere Replication before being able to install the new combined VLR Appliance. Check the documentation for more details on upgrading to enhanced vSphere replication.
For sites using array-based replication, SRAs and array managers must be installed on the new VLR appliance and configured separately.
For more details on the VLR Appliance for this release, please refer to the VMware Live Recovery Appliance documentation.
VMware Cloud Foundation Integration – Better Access to Data Protection Data
The VMware Cloud Foundation platform can run modernized workloads alongside the traditional VMs. VMware Live Recovery compatibility has been updated, particularly with respect to Virtual Machine (VM) properties for Site Recovery failover and failback support. Details on the added support for protection of service-managed VMs can be found in the documentation.
VLR is now integrated into the VCF Operations console This allows customers to monitor all VCF data protection deployments from a common console. This integration includes cyber recovery, disaster recovery, vSphere Replication and vSAN replication and remote snapshots. The Data Protection & Recovery dashboard within VCF Operations for VMware Live Recovery provides critical insights at-a-glance. Users can quickly assess how many of your virtual machines (VMs) are protected and recoverable, as well as identify any VMs that are not currently protected. Plus, the dashboard gives IT teams visibility into their protected storage capacity so they can provision their recovery infrastructure accordingly to meet their needs. Want even deeper insights? You can install the VLR and VR Management Packs to access pre-built dashboards. An example of the top-level dashboard is shown here:
Better Protection Group and Recovery Plan Integration with vSAN Data Protection
The VLR appliance also supports the vSAN ESA data protection snapshot management services and deeper integration into the VMware Live Recovery orchestration framework.
For vSAN ESA based datastores, there are now three fundamental capabilities enabled with the VLR appliance integration:
- local datastore snapshots
- remote datastore snapshots
- replication between vSAN ESA datastores
To streamline VM protection further, the Protection Group configurations are discovered and shared through either vSAN Data Protection UI or through the VMware Live Site Recovery interface further simplifying the overall administration of an enterprise level protection and recovery infrastructure.
Cyber Recovery – Enable On-Premises Scenarios – Increase Data Sovereignty
With this release of VCF and the latest release of VLR, customers have the option of following a VMware Validated Solution in 9.0 blueprint for enabling an on-premises cyber recovery clean room. This architecture will leverage VCF workload domain as the clean room, along with vSAN ESA storage cluster as cyber data vault, vDefend for network isolation and VMware Live Recovery for orchestration. Customers that need to abide by data privacy or locality requirements that prevent them from storing data in the public cloud will now be able to preserve data sovereignty with cyber recovery to their on-premises VCF clean rooms. The general architecture for this scenario is depicted in the diagram below:
Summary
The latest VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) release and the VMware Live Recovery (VLR) updates for this release contain significant updates to support the overall data protection and recovery needs of today’s IT organizations. For more information on the deeper integration of all protection products, simpler methods for deployment and management, and more options for recovery scenarios, check out these links: VMware Live Recovery and VLR Documentation.
