It’s a new year, and many of us have committed to New Year’s resolutions. Some people commit to getting out more, spending more time with family, or to reading more books. The VMware Site Recovery team’s New Year’s resolution is to build more capabilities and bring more benefits for our DRaaS users! I’m happy to say that we’re doing just that, and would like to take this opportunity to discuss the latest capabilities we’ve added.
Fan in Topology
Most DR architectures talk about protecting a main site to a DR site, or protecting from Site A to Site B. What happens if you also have a Site C, Site D, and a Site E? How would you protect them? That is exactly the problem tackled with our new support for a Fan in Topology. With this new innovation, our customers can use VMware Site Recovery to protect multiple on-prem sites to a single DR site on a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC, as depicted in the figure below.
Sounds cool? Actually, VMware Site Recovery can do even better! These multiple sites do not even have to be on-prem. You can protect a combination of multiple on-prem sites and VMware Cloud on AWS Regions to a single SDDC! Currently, this feature is available only in Preview Mode, so we can protect up to four sites to a single SDDC, but we’re working hard to improve this and support protecting more sites to a single SDDC.
Fan out Topology
The Fan in Topology complements another topology that we introduced a few months ago – Fan out. The Fan out topology enables customers to protect workloads from a single site to multiple sites. The use case for this topology is different. It helps customers that already have an on-prem DR solution, and are happy with their solution, but want to easily expand their DR capacity. With this capability, some workloads are protected from the main on-prem site to an on-prem DR site, and additional workloads are protected to VMware Cloud on AWS. You can combine the two topologies to get maximum flexibility!
Encryption
An important thing to note, is that regardless which topology you choose, once data is replicated to VMware Cloud on AWS, it is encrypted by vSAN. vSAN encryption was first introduced in on-prem deployments about a year and half ago. Since vSAN is the storage layer for VMware Cloud on AWS, all the data stored there is automatically encrypted, with keys managed by Amazon KMS.
I’ve given you a small taste of the innovations that we’re working on. Stay tuned, because this year is going to be very exciting for DRaaS users with lots more to come!
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