Pour a fresh cup of coffee because we’re back with another segment of “Feature in Five.” In just five short minutes, we deliver byte-sized demos of industry-leading VMware products. In this feature, we will focus on Disaster Recovery as a Service, or DRaaS. Let’s get started!
So how can you be sure that your DRaaS will work efficiently and effectively? Let’s dive into our video.
First, head over to your VMware Cloud on AWS console where you’ll see a couple of clusters. Then, take a look at vCenter to see what your environment looks like. From there, head to your hosts and clusters where you can see different clusters that are configured on two different vCenters. This is one of the great things about VMware Cloud on AWS – hybrid link mode so you can see all of your environments at the same time. Both on-prem, in vCenter and then below, your VMware Cloud on AWS environment. In this Feature in Five, our experts Pete Flecha and Cato Grace have laid out Cluster 01, with 10 hosts and 500 VMs in New York, and Cluster 02, also with 500 VMs in Tokyo.
Within VMware Cloud on AWS, our demo has two clusters that match up. And two things you’ll notice are 1 – these are small clusters, with only three hosts in each, 2 – you can see that our VMs are only placeholders. This is to give you an idea of where your VMs would get recovered in the event of a failover. Speaking of failovers – Pete and Cato will demo your worst nightmare. Their New York cluster just went down hard, all ten hosts went offline and all the VMs are disconnected. They’ve entered disaster recovery mode.
So, what happens now? We head over to the site-recovery console and open up the replication pair where they see errors that relate to the fact that the site went down. Next, Pete and Cato will pull up their recovery plan that has been pre-defined for recovering the New York and Tokyo environments. This is what your site-recovery should resemble as well – standard site recovery deployments and recovery plans with all of your steps pre-planned.
Now, back to our demo. Everything is tested and ready to go – it’s time to kick-off their recovery plan. The big difference you are going to see is planned migration versus disaster recovery. You can see what the differences are, here in the demo. While the recovery plan is running, errors occur. Those errors are related to the fact that the production site is down. However, by taking a look at the vSphere console, you can see that all of the VMs have been recovered. Our environment is back up and running! Another thing you might notice – our cluster is no longer three hosts, but eight. Pete and Cato were right in the middle of adding an eighth host, which is why the warning sign is still visible. But while the recovery was running, the VMs were adding hosts into the environment at the same time.
To wrap it up, this is what VMware Cloud on AWS gives you. Not only peace of mind that your data centers will recover in the event of a failover, but will also give you the ability to add additional hosts. In a regular environment, adding a host takes weeks or months, in this scenario, adding a host took ten minutes. You can kick that script off as part of failover, get hosts added and end up with everything recovered. Learn more about Disaster Recovery as a Service in just 5 minute by watching our video!
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