Enhanced vCloud Air Disaster Recovery features coming soon

Lots to talk about over at VMware’s Cloud Services Business Unit.  Yesterday VMware made the Virtual Private Cloud On-Demand Generally Available which is the new pay as you go credit card offering.  They also announced enhanced Disaster Recovery features that will be released in the coming months.  I think this announcement went a little unheard due to the big splash On-Demand made.

This release is of particular importance to me, as it is the one I am concentrating all my time and effort developing demo’s, video’s, tutorials, use cases and presentations on, so excuse me for being a little excited lol.  I will also be talking about this more in-depth at the London VMUG on 22nd January.

The three key features for the next release of vCloud Air Disaster Recovery are:

Native Fail back

Native fail back allows you to replicate your virtual machines back to your on premises datacenter, after you have performed a failover. This is really important when you think about how in the event of a disaster you failover all your virtual machines to the cloud. you need the ability to restore your service in your datacenter. Native fail back allows you to use reverse replication, which essentially just repoints the replication of the virtual machines back to your on premises vSphere environment.

Multiple Point in Time Recovery

This allows you to recover back to 24 previous replication points in time. In the event of a failover, you set for example, a15 minute recovery point objective and you start the replication at 10 AM. So every 15 minutes you replicate your data changes. Now in the event of a failover, you can pick a specific time to recover from. So for example your Datacentre has an issue and you need to failover at 11 o’clock. The data may not be suitable so you may decide to recover at 10:15 for example. With the multiple point in time recovery you are able to pick the specific point that you want to have that data recovered, Allowing you to successfully recover in the event of data corruption.

Self Service Automation

From an automation perspective, there is full integration with vRealize Orchestrator through a plugin. This allows you to create multiple virtual machine recovery plans and automate the failover and power on scenarios. By leveraging vRealize orchestrator, You can create groups of virtual machines you want to failover and power on in specific orders. This gives us greater flexibility when building a fully automated end-to-end disaster recovery solution.

How it works

We start with an on premises data centre and we deploy the vsphere replication appliance and configure a vcloud air disaster recovery cloud as an endpoint.

VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery

We start with an on premises datacentre and we deploy the vsphere replication appliance and configure a vcloud air disaster recovery cloud as an endpoint.  This then allows us to replicate to the vCloud Air disaster recovery Cloud.

Once we setup the replication of the virtual machines. They appear as placeholders, allowing us to recover in the event of an on premises data centre failure.

We can now initiate a recovery to the cloud environment, and all our workloads will be running in the cloud, as this failover was caused by a datacenter failure. We can now concentrate on rebuilding or restoring our on premises datacenter. When the datacenter is ready to host workloads again, using reverse replication, we can simply fail back to that on premises datacenter.

The full announcement discussing the features and including all the latest networking cooliness coming can be read by clicking here.

I will be at Partner Exchange presenting a number of sessions so if you have questions please come and find me.  My schedule is here.