Today, we are excited to launch VMware Site Recovery, a robust disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) offering that protects workloads between on-premises datacenters and VMware Cloud on AWS, as well as between different instances of VMware Cloud on AWS. The new service lets you take advantage of a consistent, vSphere-based infrastructure and operating environment that extends from on-premises to VMware Cloud on AWS.
The solution leverages our 10+ years of Disaster Recovery(DR) innovations by building on the proven technologies of VMware Site Recovery Manager for advanced orchestration automation and vSphere Replication for flexible, hypervisor-based replication. VMware Site Recovery allows customers to protect critical data and applications while taking advantage of cloud flexibility and economics—enabling admins to accelerate their time-to-protection by removing the need to build a secondary DR site and by dramatically simplifying DR operations and enabling ‘DR in a day’!
Customers have major challenges with traditional DR solutions
Majority of customers fall into one of two camps when it comes to disaster protection: they do not have a disaster recovery plan at all or they only have one (that is often unproven) for a small subset of their workloads. With either, their business is at risk to operational failures, natural disasters, or human-caused events.
Lack of proper DR planning is often related to 3 reasons:
- High capital costs: additional datacenter costs, real estate, storage costs, etc.
- High operational costs: labor costs, power/cooling, maintenance, etc.
- Complex management: complex planning and DR tools that require working with multiple vendors across different environments.
Simplify disaster recovery across a common operating environment
VMware Site Recovery can solve these common DR challenges by helping you:
- Accelerate time-to-protection: Remove the need to build a secondary DR site and implement DR in a day with familiar tools and the same operating environment from on-premises to the public cloud
- Simplify DR operations: Streamline operations with automated failover and failback and simplify ongoing maintenance and non-disruptive testing
- Apply Cloud Economics: Reduce secondary site management costs with cloud-managed infrastructure and only pay for what you use with granular, on-demand cloud pricing
VMware Site Recovery key use cases
VMware Site Recovery is built for the following DR use cases:
- Protect on-premises datacenters against unplanned disasters or proactively avoid disasters by gracefully shutting down the VMs in protected sites and failing over to the DR site
- Protect VMware Cloud on AWS instances using on-premises infrastructure in case of unplanned cloud-related downtimes
- Protect a VMware Cloud on AWS instances to another region or Availability Zone (AZ)
Now let’s take a closer look at some of the key functionalities available with VMware Site Recovery.
Ease of initial setup and ongoing management
Customers want ONE simple DR tool to use for site protection to avoid the complexity and cost of deploying traditional DR solutions. VMware Site Recovery provides a single platform based on vSphere that enables customers to utilize natively integrated and familiar tools. The initial setup and configuration can be completed in about an hour by walking through a guided and intuitive interface. The service is based on individual VMs and applications placed in flexible application consistency groups and does not require special agents.
The ongoing management of VMware Site Recovery will be handled by VMware just like the rest of VMware Cloud on AWS, which means no extra resources are required for the DR site. All the UI is updated to HTML5 to provide an intuitive and consistent user experience.
Simple failover with one-click
When disasters happen, it is critical to have a very simple process to failover workloads to the DR site. Many traditional solutions require a manual playbook to ensure workloads are restarted properly and with the right timing. These processes are rarely tested which opens the door for any number of issues from human errors to longer recovery times. VMware Site Recovery provides a simple, one-click failover during disasters, so that your business workloads are predictably and seamlessly moved to the DR site.
VMware Site Recovery one-click failover ensures minimal downtime for your major stakeholders (application owners, end users, customers, etc.), helping your business continue to operate with minimal to no disruption.
Predictable failback with one-click
After failover and once the original site is available, most customers want to move their workloads back as soon as possible. VMware Site Recovery simplifies and automates this process as well with one-click failback. All of the workloads are moved back to the original site without any complex processes and by following the runbooks from the original failover.
The simplicity of failback means the process will be fast and reliable and customers do not need to spend any extra resources in managing this operation.
Non-disruptive, on-demand testing
With legacy approaches to disaster recovery, testing is typically conducted once or twice a year. This is mostly because of great organizational cost, which sometimes involves production downtime or significant disruptions. Between the tests, organizations have very little visibility into their ability to meet the business requirements. VMware Site Recovery enables non-disruptive testing so organizations can test as frequently as desired to identify issues and resolve them, thus increasing confidence in their DR plans and meeting recovery SLAs.
Frequent testing provides organizations with great confidence that RTOs will be met. Any issues in recovery plans can be identified quickly and remediated.
Simple pricing
VMware Site Recovery is offered as an add-on to your current VMware Cloud on AWS deployment. The add-on offers on-demand pricing on a per-VM basis with granular (hourly) metering—and monthly billing. Regardless of the VMs size, you are charged for the VMs you are protecting, when you are protecting them. Additional pricing information can be found here.
Get Started Today
To learn more about VMware Site Recovery, check out the latest demos and technical information at:
To learn more about the recent VMware Cloud on AWS announcement, read the blog here.
