Introduction
In this blog we will go through the Disaster Recovery (DR) of Cloud Director Availability. We will configure Disaster Recovery but also show the possibilities and options.
Our Scenario
I have created a vAPP with 3 virtual machines. We want to create a Disaster Recovery (DR) to our second datacenter. We want to Disaster Recovery to have a RPO of 5 Minutes and a retention policy of 12 instances created every two hours.
This will give us 12 instances over 24 hours. After 24 hours I won’t need Disaster Recovery anymore, because I have backups in place.
Understanding and Configuring Disaster Recovery
Let’s start with configuring our Disaster Recovery.
1. Login to your Cloud Director portal.
2. On the left side under “More” you will see your Cloud Director Availability instances.
3. Click on it.
4. Now you will see Cloud Director Availability.
5. As you can see we don’t have any DR configured.
6. Click on “Outgoing Replications”.
7. Click on “Outgoing Replications”.
8. Select your “Destination site”.
9. Make sure you are on “vApp” and click on the “New Protection” icon.
10. Now you will see the “New Outgoing Protection” screen.
11. Select your “Destination site”.
12. Make sure you are on “vApp” and choose the vApp you want to protect.
13. Click on “Next”.
14. On the next screen you can choose the Destination VDC but also the Storage Tier you want to use.
15. Choose the correct VDC and Tier storage.
16. Click on “Next”.
Information! The “Advanced Datastore Settings” can be used to choose different storage tiers for every VM or even every Hard disk on the VM’s.
17. On this screen we can select a predefined SLA profile provided by your Cloud Provider or manually configure the SLA settings.
18. In our case we will configure our settings manually.
17. Select “Configure settings manually”.
18. Now we go through the “RPO” and “Retention Policy”.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
RPO stands for Recovery Point Objective. This will make sure you can go back 5 minutes in case of a Disaster Recovery. Cloud Director Availability will create every 5 minutes a instance and remove the old one.
After it created the instance it will consolidate the previous 5 minute instance. This makes sure it only needs the Delta’s instead of the full copy.
Retention Policy
The Retention Policy provides extra instances instead of the single 5 minutes instance. You can select the amount of instances, distance between every instance and the Unit the distance is configured at.
19. For the RPO we choose 5 minutes, because we want the most close instance in case of a DR.
20. For the Retention Policy we choose 12 instances with a Distance of 2 hours. This will make it possible to return back every 2 hours for a total of 24 hours with 12 instances.
21. Once you have configured the RPO and Retention Policy we can click on “Next”.
Information! Other options can be enabled. These are extra settings that can help you with creating the DR you need. The i icon next to the setting will give you more information about the setting.
22. Now we see a summary of all the settings we have chosen.
23. If everything is correct click on “Finish”.
24. It will start configuring the replication/DR.
25. Once the configuration is completed we can see our “Protection”.
26. Here you can see the configuration of the DR/Protection.
Status
On every vApp and VM you will see a green, blue or red dot.
A green dot means everything is healthy.
A blue dot means there is currently a instance created (5 minutes RPO).
A red dot means there is something wrong with the replication.
Information! Replications won’t work if the VM is “Shut Down”. The VM needs to be running to be able to replicate.
Testing the Protection
We can test our DR/Protection by running a test. Keep in mind this will cause a short outage, because the VM will be migrated to the other Datacenter.
If you run a “Test” Cloud Director Availability will first sync the vApp and VM’s before it performs a test. This is to make sure you won’t lose any data (because of the 5 Minute RPO) while testing.
