VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager—Where Theory Meets Practice

Jeff Drury, Mountain States Networking

Mike Laverick, VMware

INF-BCO1757

#vmworldinf

+ Agenda Mission Statement

LUNs/Volumes VMware Best Practices – Engage Brain!

Storage vMotion Workaround

How vSphere Replication can help

DIY-DR (Do It Yourself Disaster Recovery)

“We can script all this…”

+ Mission Statement

Seamlessly blend the world of theory and “best practice”, with what actually happens in the real world – using real world case-studies.

+ Some Stats ‘N’ Facts 62% of all recovery plans had errors in the plans

47% of DR Plans successful

What sort of errors?

47% - Not kept up to date

34% - Unavailable or inaccurate passwords

13% - Failure of restore process

Other reasons

22% - Insufficient backup power

18% - Communication failures

17% - Insufficient staff training

14% - Recovery priorities not identified

14% - Insufficient documentation

12% - Event not discovered quickly enough, Activation delayed

From Continuity Central/e-janco http://www.continuitycentral.com/news05628.html

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+ Why virtualize DR?

The Promise of Early virtualization Cost savings Low-hanging fruit Quid pro quo?

Challenge Are you virtual enough? VM Ratios Tier-one applications

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+ Stretched Cluster Vs SRM

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SRM Cluster

Distance Limited No Yes

VirtualCenter Integrated

Yes No

DR Workflow Creation

Yes No*

Transparent Failover

No Yes

Non-disruptive DR testing

Yes No

NFS Supported Yes Yes

Site Failure VM Protection

Yes Yes

*Note: Scripted workflows are possible ** You may need a HA and SRM combo

+ Stretched clusters Benefits Better RPOs? Better RTOs?

Application aware

Data consistency

Vendors DoubleTake NeverFail Microsoft clustering Veritas Clustering

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+ “I think the Database team does

some replication?” • Large government organization with

established DR site.

• “The network team has their DR plan, the storage team has data replication, the database guys do something with their stuff. Can SRM make all of that work?”

• Protecting the VM doesn’t always mean the applications will work.

• There are many BC/DR tools. Building a good SRM Recovery Plan requires knowledge of every departments needs.

+ Challenges of Stretched Clusters Not always in the original design

Many require specialist storage technologies

NetApp MetroCluster

EMC VPLEX

Networking

IP addresses

DNS updates

Split brain

VMware HA requirements at odds with VMware SRM?

Is your vendor supported yet?

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+ Hey my buddy has a killer Datacenter….

Biggest obstacle for disaster recovery is cost.

Teaming up with another company to reduce the cost should be considered

Multi-Tenancy and other buzz words to the rescue!

Secure networks, data replication, resource segregation, that’s the easy part. Then the CEO got involved.

“In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.” ― Napoleon Bonaparte

+ DIY-DR (Do It Yourself-Disaster-Recovery)

Many BUs and Application Owners – DIY-DR in Guest OS

Better RPOs

Better RTOs

DIY-DR Hugging…

BUT… Availability as DR

Split Brain & Patch Management

Different Vendors/No Consistency

Only They can do it!

No Test Facility

+ “We can script all this…”

PowerCLI 1 : 0 Site Recovery Manager

We LOVE PowerCLI…

BUT… “We used to know this guy called, Bob…”

Scripting is a moveable feast – doesn’t react well to changes

Waste time duplicating what SRM already does…

SRM does not equal – no scripting

+ What is Site Recovery Manager

Simplifies and automates disaster recovery workflows:

Setup, testing, failover

Turns manual recovery runbooks into automated recovery plans

Provides central management of recovery plans from the VMware vSphere Client

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Works with VMware vSphere to make disaster recovery rapid, reliable,

manageable, affordable

Site Recovery Manager leverages VMware vSphere to deliver advanced disaster recovery management and automation

+ Deployment Scenarios

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Standard Deployment • 1:1 mapping between each

protected site and its recovery site

Shared Recovery Sites • Multiple sites can be protected by

a single, shared recovery site

• Leverage for remote office/branch office topologies

+ VMware Best Practice = Engage Brain

BU1 BU2 BU2

+ Best Practices vs. Business Needs SRM being used for datacenter migration for large

healthcare company.

vSphere best practices placed T1/T2 VM’s on SAS/SSD, T3 VM’s on SATA. Windows and Linux VM’s separated to enhance deduplication and storage enhancements.

VM’s from multiple business units on the same datastores.

Replication established between Utah and Texas for all data…until SRM was needed.

“I guess it is good we have Storage vMotion licensed. Can you make some more LUN’s?”

BU1

BU2

T1 T2

T1 T2

BU1

BU2

T1 T2

T1 T2

+ Storage vMotion as Workaround

Move VMs into new Storage Silos

BUT: Even with VAAI, it takes time

Requires new LUNs

Identify each VM in Application or Business Unit

Liaise with Business Unit or Application Owner prior to move

Time for replication to re-establish RPO/RTO

SvMotion is funky with SRM…

Hey, aren’t we meant to be getting rid of the silo?!?!?!

+ Multi-Site DR and Replication?

Large multi state private school, 22 branch sites, primary datacenter, secondary datacenter

Primary to secondary is easy, what do we do with all the branch sites?

Centralization is good, until you have to implement it.

Before SRM 5, the SAN was responsible for replication, that means lots of VSA’s, increased cost and complexity.

“Our DR plan is great…as long as we don’t have to use it.”

+ vSphere Replication Enabled on per-VM or per-VM Folder basis

Escape the LUN/Volume Silo

Any to Any Replication

Say Goodbye: To the Evil Storage Team! No SRA needed

No Array Credentials needed

Say Hello: To the Evil WAN Team instead!

BUT… Enable bandwidth/priority

controls with NIOC

Status information…

+ Integrated into vSphere5.1

Standard virtual Appliance format

Manage replication as policy of the VM

itself

Monitor and manage replication and recovery from

one screen

Deploy a virtual appliance, manage through a web browser!

+ Single Site vSphere Replication Architecture

Storage

vSphere Client

Storage VMDK1 (VMDK1)

VR Appliance

vCenter Server

Delta

NFC

Replication configured via client

Agents track

changes and send blocks to

the VR appliance

VR Appliance

writes blocks to disk via

NFC

vSphere

VR Agent

vSphere

VR Agent

+ Cloudy Futures

No PowerPoint would be complete without Dilbert!

VMware vCloud® Director™ Protection

Cloud DR Providers

Policy-based DR

vMotion Anywhere – Disaster Avoidance

Reduced TCO – Guest IP Management

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+ DR to the Cloud – VDC-Level DR Protection

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vCloud Director

SRM vShield

vCloud Director

vCenter

Org VDC2 Org VDC1

SRM vShield

vCenter

Enterprise

Vision:

DR delivered as a service to organizations

Application owners able to determine and control their DR requirements

Org VDC2

DR to the Cloud – Leverage Service Providers

vCloud Director

SRM vShield

vCenter

• With SRM and vCloud Director, enterprises will be able to implement DR more cost effectively by leveraging service providers

• Multi-tenancy will be delivered using vCloud Director and vShield products (security services)

• DR protection for both “classic” vSphere and vCloud Director environments

Service Provider

vCenter

SRM

+ Policy Based Disaster Recovery

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SRM • Storage

selection • Configure

Protection Groups

• Assigns

VMs to a recovery plan

Vision: • Migrating to a policy-

based DR model simplifies provisioning process

• Start by creating multiple DR tiers of service (DR policy SLAs)

• Users simply associate their application with the appropriate DR policy

• SRM will monitor resources and capacity to ensure service levels can be maintained

+ vMotion Anywhere – Disaster Avoidance

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vMotion of workloads across • vCenter instances within the datacenter • Across campus and metro distances • Long distances. Full orchestration of VM movement • vCenter and solution configuration • Storage • Live state Integrate with existing data replication and mirroring technologies Management through SRM

Reducing RTO – Guest IP Customization

• 40% of SRM customers forced to re-IP VMs at the recovery site

• Impacts recovery time objective (RTO)

• Existing solutions such as stretching VLANs only work for smaller distances

• Ecosystem and VMware are working on solutions to eliminate the need for re-configuring IP addresses at longer distances. Examples: Cisco OTV, VPLS

Site A Site B

SUBNET 10.30.x.y

IP re-configuration during failover

DR Protected Site DR Recovery Site

SUBNET 10.20.x.y

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Any Questions?

FILL OUT A SURVEY

EVERY COMPLETE SURVEY IS ENTERED INTO DRAWING FOR A

$25 VMWARE COMPANY STORE GIFT CERTIFICATE

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager—Where Theory Meets Practice

Jeff Drury, Mountain States Networking

Mike Laverick, Mike Laverick Ltd

INF-BCO1757

#vmworldinf