by: VMware on VMware Staff
To learn more about how IT utilized VMware Cloud on AWS for disaster recovery, read the blog, “How VMware Migrated the VMworld Portal to VMware Cloud on AWS.”
After successfully using VMware Cloud on AWS for the VMworld HOL, we were evaluating additional workload to migrate. The criteria we used was any application that would benefit from burstable capacity and application-level disaster recovery. The goal was not to migrate workload for the sake of migration. The application migrated needed to benefit from running on VMware Cloud on AWS.
The first application the team chose was the VMworld portal, which was hosted inhouse. The infrastructure capacity needed by the portal fluctuates throughout the year. The capacity requirement peaks around VMworld USA and VMworld EMEA. The portal needs close to 100% availability during the peak usage times. To get close to 100% availability, we needed a solid disaster recovery (DR) plan. We have a good DR plan for the applications hosted inhouse, but the DR plan is not granular at an application level. A failover affects multiple applications. This increases the risk associated with doing a failover.
By moving this application to VMware Cloud on AWS, we solved two problems. The capacity for the application could be dynamically added or removed with the associated cost increasing or decreasing. The application could be independently failed over during a disaster scenario.
Since this application is tightly integrated with applications running in our private cloud and our SaaS applications, we needed to build some core services and security services in the VMware Cloud on AWS as a pre-requisite. This was a onetime effort during our migration and will benefit future migrated applications. Our team built these services and migrated the VMworld portal primary instance to VMware Cloud on AWS, then created the DR instance in our private cloud. The team uses Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to manage both the primary and DR instances.
In addition, we are in the process of moving few more applications using VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX). Learn more in the the technical description of this project, “How VMware Migrated the VMworld Portal to VMware Cloud on AWS.”
To learn more, attend VMworld 2018 session LDT1873, A Peek into The Future of VMware IT’s Multi-Cloud Strategy.
For further reading on IT’s adoption of VMware Cloud on AWS, read the following blogs:
VMware’s Journey to VMware Cloud on AWS – Part 1
How IT Leveraged VMware Cloud on AWS as Part of the Hands-on Lab at VMworld 2017
Video: Adding Burst Capacity for the VMworld Hands-on Lab using VMware Cloud on AWS
VMware on VMware blogs are written by IT subject matter experts sharing stories about our digital transformation using VMware products and services in a global production environment. Contact your sales rep or [email protected] to schedule a briefing on this topic. Visit the VMware on VMware microsite and follow us on Twitter.
