VMware is a great hypervisor platform! But at times, even in a hypervisor environment there may be a need to ensure the applications running inside the virtual machine are highly available, performant or even have the capability of recovering on a different site. Veritas Technologies are experts in providing application centric high availability, storage performance and disaster recovery. We have been delivering these capabilities to the market for decades - and in recent years as more and more of our customers have started to move their core critical applications to VMware we have extended our capability to ensure we can meet their needs regardless of which platform they choose to run.
We deliver these capabilities with our InfoScale product offering. InfoScale abstracts the storage infrastructure and allows customers to use local, shared and object storage all at the same time. Allowing a choice of storage ensures relevant storage performance, data resiliency, and efficient consumption of storage resources, helping our customers lower their cost of storage consumption. Customers can use Flash Storage in their ESX servers as a read cache to accelerate application performance with InfoScale SmartIO and object storage as a lower tier of storage with InfoScale SmartTier. Because InfoScale provides an abstraction layer which is agnostic to the storage infrastructure, it also helps customers migrate from one storage vendor to another non-disruptively, or from one architecture or platform to another - such as from physical to virtual - with minimal disruption and minimal risk.
Managing risk for the business is also the core concern when ensuring application resiliency, as occurs when infrastructure fails or we humans make mistakes. This is the second critical capability which InfoScale brings to VMware. InfoScale monitors application resources and services with the Intelligent Monitoring Framwork (IMF), discovering failure immediately with minimal overhead and with in-depth monitoring ensuring application processes are not just online but functional and with Fast Failover which ensures application can be recovered in seconds. InfoScale also comes with integrated out of the box agents which work with VMware vmdk disks, and services, without disrupting the use of VMware vMotion or Dynamic Resource Scheduling. For highly available architectures customers can choose from a variety of configurations such as availability with native files systems and volume management, Cluster File System using vmdk disks with the Multi-Writer Flag, or Cluster File System with Flexible Storage Sharing using only locally mounted storage in-guest, perfect for vSAN, in a single site or when stretched between sites.
Managing application fail over for services between sites, which are geo distant is also embedded in InfoScale. With our Global Clusters configuration, InfoScale can orchestrate the failover between clusters, including managing the replication regardless of how the data is being replicated, at the storage array level, at the application level or with the embedded Veritas Volume Replication (VVR). VVR comes with support for synchronous and asynchronous replication, but also the ability to allow synchronous replication to become asynchronous replication in case of high I/O pressure or bandwidth limitations. VVR can also be configured with a bunker allowing asynchronous replication to achieve zero data loss. VVR also provides the added advantage of being agnostic to the hardware and the architecture, allowing customers to use VMware as a Disaster Recovery target for physical environments or public cloud as a Disaster Recovery target for VMware environments.
With InfoScale you can also manage high availability and disaster recovery for business services which consist of multiple tires and where each tier might reside in separate clusters, on different operating systems, even on completely different platforms.
To provide complete Disaster Recovery Orchestration, Veritas has built the Resiliency Platform (VRP). VRP extends the InfoScale application-centric coverage to also include the management and orchestration of VMware Virtual Machines. As we recognize that while its critically important to manage those applications, which require Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) which are close to zero, for complete coverage you also need to be able to manage those workloads which don’t have such strict requirements and those workloads which reside in Virtual Machines. VRP also lets you manage migration, rehearsal and take over for VMs with Just-in-Time provisioning of VMs at the Disaster Recovery target site.
At VMworld 2019 Europe this year we are going to tell you how and show you how you can build this capability into your own VMware estate. Register and come to my session Destination unlimited: The super powers of virtual apps [BCA6304BES] on Tuesday November 5th at 11:00. See you at VMworld 2019 in Barcelona!
