Availability of VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery

By Nabil Quadri, product line manager, VMware, Inc.

Looking for a fast, easy-to-use disaster recovery solution that will protect critical applications without breaking the bank? We introduce a new on-demand DRaaS solution from VMware, Inc. that offers this and more.

When you hear the words ‘Disaster Recovery’, do you immediately think about natural disasters like hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, and so on? While it is true that the risk of natural disasters and extreme weather events is real for many businesses and even seems higher these days than before, with such events occurring at greater intensity and in quick succession across the globe. But if we look at the data, it turns out, things like ransomware attacks and mundane operational issues like power outages and hardware failures account for the majority of DR events. So, the ability to recover from these sorts of events quickly before the impact to the business becomes irreversible – is crucially important.

Plain old backups are just not up to the task anymore. You need the quick recovery time, frequent testability, reliability, and automation that comes with a full-fledged DR solution. And you need the solution to be cost-effective. The elasticity of the cloud offers a path to achieving these goals.

Easy-to-use, on-demand disaster recovery
It is with this in mind that VMware recently acquired Datrium, an innovator in the DR market. In the few short months since the acquisition closed, we have been hard at work integrating Datrium’s scale-out cloud file system and cloud-based orchestration technology into the VMware Cloud Services platform, while further enhancing the performance and capabilities of the solution. Today, we announce the availability of VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery – a new disaster recovery as-a-service (DRaaS) offering from VMware.

VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (or VMware Cloud DR for short) is an on-demand DRaaS solution that is delivered as an easy-to-use SaaS solution and offers cloud economics to help keep your costs under control. With this service, you start out by deploying a light-weight connector appliance in your on-premises vSphere environment. You can then replicate critical VMs running there to a cost-effective and efficient cloud storage layer called the Scale-out Cloud File System (SCFS) instead of primary storage in a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC.

When you want to conduct a DR test or perform an actual recovery, you can elastically add on-demand host capacity in VMware Cloud on AWS. The service makes it possible to recover rapidly at scale by leveraging the live mount capability, which allows VMs to be powered-on in VMware Cloud on AWS immediately while continuing to run off the SCFS. A full-featured and SaaS-simple DR orchestrator is built in to minimize the need for manual effort during recovery. And an efficient, delta-based orchestrated failback workflow is supported right out of the box.

We have integrated VMware Cloud DR with the VMware Cloud Services platform and VMware Cloud on AWS to ensure fast recovery of your applications and complete operational consistency between your production site and the cloud-based DR site. You can manage both sites with vCenter and the vSphere Client, you retain access to familiar vSphere abstractions, and can reuse your operational runbooks instead of having to switch to a complete different set of abstractions, management tools, and operational runbooks at the worst possible time.

The service is available starting today in 9 VMware Cloud on AWS regions across the globe.

Service highlights:

Simple pricing inclusive of the cost of the underlying cloud infrastructure used to provide the DR service – including the cloud storage consumed by the Scale-out Cloud File System
Pay for the recovery host capacity in VMware Cloud on AWS separately, only when you need it
Deploy, protect and recover with a few clicks in a modern UI integrated into VMware Cloud
Option to maintain a small, pre-provisioned ‘pilot light’ SDDC to run foundational components and further speed up recovery
Backups are kept in the native vSphere format so there is no need for brittle, time-consuming VM format conversions – things just work
Automatic over-the-air upgrades of the connector appliance in protected site
Automatic, seamless cloud service upgrades and self-healing cloud components
Continuous DR health checks run automatically every 30mn to identify any config drift or other issues that might interfere with a successful recovery and issue early warning alerts so that you can remediate things quickly
Integrity-first design of the file system with data integrity checks built in at every stage of the data path, augmented by additional daily data integrity checks of the backup copies
Well-suited for recovery from ransomware attacks because of the ability to retain a deep history of immutable, incorruptible snapshots coupled with the ability to rapidly power-on hundreds of VMs from any of these snapshots
Audit-ready, detailed DR reports