VMware Site Recovery – An Awesome DRaaS Gets Even Better!
Until about seven years ago, in order to protect the files on my personal laptop, I used an external hard drive, which was clunky, heavy, and slow. If you wanted a device with enough capacity, you had to go with a slow spinning disk drive, while if you wanted speed, you had to pay a huge premium for SSD drives. But the worst part was reliability – I backed up my files once a month, but my laptop failures did not follow this routine, and when my laptop failed, I lost all the new information since the last backup. But seven years ago, I started using cloud backup services. Such services provide seamless sync and backup to the cloud, so my data is never lost, and I do not need to go through the hassle of manually backing up my files.
Main Use-Cases
Naturally, enterprises require highly reliable solutions, including highly reliable disaster-recovery (DR) solutions. However, building a reliable DR solution is hard – customers need to invest in building a secondary DR site that is often not tested frequently, and sits idle until a disaster happens. VMware Site Recovery uses public cloud to help enterprises solve the DR problem, similar to the way that cloud backup services help consumers. VMware Site Recovery is a Disaster Recovery as-a-Service (DRaaS) on VMware Cloud on AWS which is built on three key components:
- The ability to quickly and easily spin up a VMware environment on AWS, instead of building a secondary on-prem DR target
- vSphere Replication to protect your data with a 5-minute RPO, regardless of the underlying storage solution
- Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to orchestrate your recovery in case of a disaster, to run non-disruptive testing to verify your DR plan, and to provide detailed reporting needed for DR compliance
These capabilities allow VMware Site Recovery customers to easily deploy a DR solution if they don’t have one. For customers that already have a DR solution, VMware Site Recovery enables a way to easily protect more workloads, or to save money and completely replace their existing DR solution. Finally, it also enables customers to protect workloads across multiple AWS regions. The chart below summarizes these use cases:
While VMware Site Recovery works with any storage solution, it is especially appealing for customers with vSAN powered solutions such as Dell-EMC VxRail. Such customers enjoy the agility and reduced costs achieved through hyperconverged infrastructure, the reliability of our DRaaS, while spending less time on operating the same software stack on-prem and in their cloud DR target.
Exciting Innovations
This month is especially exciting! We added even more capabilities to VMware Site Recovery: we doubled the number of VMs that can be protected to a single SDDC cluster to 1000 VMs, and we also introduced a preview of a new fan-in capability that enables customers to protect multiple on-prem environments to a single VMware Cloud on AWS DR target.
New Promotion
Finally, this great DRaaS can soon be consumed with a new price promotion – free VMware Site Recovery Add-On for VMC on AWS for up to 90 days* for a maximum of 200 VMs. Customers who want to be the first to know when the promotion goes live should sign up for to receive and email update in our newly launched website.
Interested in learning more? Don’t miss the VMware Site Recovery sessions at VMworld Europe – the deep-dive session (HCI3136BE) takes place on Wednesday and the overview session (HYP3019BE) takes place on Thursday. Make sure you also visit our website. To try this out with a single host deployment go to: http://vmwa.re/vmc-getstarted.
* Terms and conditions apply. To learn more visit our website.
