Software replication to remote sites during disaster recovery?
I have been doing research on multiple VM (windows) backup/replication software like Veeam, Appassure, Unitrend, and Zerto.
They all have one issue: if you want fast recovery at a remote site during a disaster, you have to have a live backup or standby VMs at the remote site.
The problem would be that the standby VMs would require storage resources. That means the person who bough the software will need to pay premium fees in order to have a fast recovery.
If you don't have standby VMs ready, it would take around 24 hours, or more, to export all the replicated VMs, depending on how many VMs you have.
Does VVR have a faster recovery time during disaster without having standby VMs?
Hi MIG31,
VVR is a volume replication software that requires a source server and 1 to 32 target servers. This means that the DR site would need to have a standby target server for VVR to replicate to.
VVR is used a lot with our Clustering product when using the Global Cluster Option. This allows for end to end failover of your application (not virtual machine) from site to site during a disaster. In other words we will ensure that the data is replicated to the DR site and do the needed recovery actions to bring up the application in the Disaster recovery site when it is needed. We basically automate the process for site failover so that by default with a push of a button, the application is migrated/moved between sites.
Keep in mind that I'm refering to the applications moving between sites and not VMs. VVR does not work at the entire VM level. But with our solution we can automate most or all of the tasks needed to get your application running in a disaster situation.
Thank you,
Wally
Note with VVR, one server/VM at your remote site can handle replication fom muliple servers/VMs at your your primary site (providing it can handle the I/O). Therefore you can buy one VVR licence for your DR site and then in the event of DR, you can distribute the replicated storage (RDM or VMDK) from your DR VM to the target VMs at DR.
Note while VVR is replicating to a remote site, you cannot access the storage at the remote site.
So for example you could have
Application A on VM VM-PrA using storage in Diskgroup A-DG
Application B on VM VM-PrB using storage in Diskgroup B-DG
Application C on VM VM-PrC using storage in Diskgroup C-DG
and all these VMs replicate to single VM at your DR site - VM-DrRep
Then in the event of DR you build VMs at DR site for VM-PrA, VM-PrB, VM-PrC and then make Diskgroups A-DG, B-DG, C-DG writable on VM-DrRep (run a VVR takeover) and then present each of these diskgroups to their respective VMs at DR
This solution would require VVR licence on all Primary VMs and just the one DR VM.
I believe Microsoft Azure offers a solution based on this using Symantec repliction to one target in the cloud.
Mike