VMware Cloud Expert

Lab 08 - DRaaS with VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (Part2)

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Introduction

VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery is an on-demand disaster recovery service that provides an easy-to-use Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution and offers cloud economics to keep your disaster recovery costs under control.

You can use VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery to protect your vSphere virtual machines (VMs) by replicating them to the cloud, and recovering them as needed to a target VMware Cloud Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) on VMware Cloud on AWS. You can create the target "recovery" SDDC immediately prior to performing a recovery, and it does not need to be provisioned to support replications in a steady state.

Using VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery you can protect your On-premises and/or VMC on AWS SDDCs and recover them into the cloud.

VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery lets you deploy a recovery SDDC in VMware Cloud on AWS (or add an existing SDDC) to use for recovery and testing of your DR plans. You can add hosts, clusters, new networks, request public IP addresses, configure NAT rules, and also delete the recovery SDDC. In the event of a disaster or planned recovery operation, you can recover VMs from your protected site to your recovery SDDC.

TASKS

Task 1 - Create a DR Plan

A DR Plan defines the orchestration configuration for disaster recovery and workload mobility.

Plans run either for recovery as an actual DR plan operation, or they run as a test recovery, which performs all of the plan’s recovery operations in a test site for validation.

Execution pacing is configurable. When a plan runs, a running instance of the plan launches and typically continues executing its recovery steps to completion. A recovery or test plan can also continue to specific points in the process and wait for user input, or it can stop and wait for a specified time limit, and then continue until the next stop or to completion. You can also add pre or post-scripting to a VM’s recovery step.

VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery performs a set of continuous compliance checks for all active plans and resources, and it reports on environmental changes, such as vSphere misconfigurations or network outages. Compliance Checks detect any compromised plan integrity at the time of misconfiguration or equipment failure. Compliance checks give the user the opportunity to address issues and restore the plan's integrity before a disaster occurs. For developing and retaining the skill set of related DR activities, you should still perform periodic full DR exercises with the staff involved.

VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery can maintain multiple plans of different types, and multiple plans can be in various stages of execution at any given time, even concurrently.

  1. From the VDI desktop access your VMware Cloud DR Browser tab. If you previously closed the tab or if your session timed out please see Part 1 - Task 3.1, steps 1-14
  2. In the VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery UI, click Recovery Plans 
  3. Click Create plan
  4. In the Create Plan dialog, configure the Plan as follows:
    • Plan Name: VMCEXPERT#-XX_DR_Plan  (Where # is your Environment Id and XX is your student number)
    • Description: <Leave default>
    • Recovery Site: Existing recovery SDDC
    • Protected Site: <Select you assigned Protected site> i.e. Protected DC01 (01-10), Protected DC02 (11-20), or Protected DC03 (21-30)
    • vCenter: <Leave default>
    • Groups: <Choose_your_protection_group> i.e. VMCEXPERT2-31_PG
    • vCenter Failover mapping: <Leave default>
    • vCenter Folder Mapping: Select Map Folders button
      • In the Source (On-Premises) vCenter Select vAppXX (where XX is your student number)
      • In the SDDC vCenter Select Workloads
      • Click Add
      • Click Ok
  1. Click Next, and continue configuring your Plan
    • Compute Resources Failover mapping Click Map Compute Resources button
      • In the Source (On-Premises) vCenter Select Cluster01
      • In the SDDC vCenter Select Compute-ResourcePool
      • Click Add
      • Click Ok
  1. Click Next, and continue configuring your Plan
    • Virtual Network Failover mapping Click Map Virtual Network button
      • In the Source (On-Premises) vCenter Select <vDS-Production-vAppXX> (where XX is your student number)
      • In the SDDC vCenter Select sddc-cgw-network-1
      • Click Add
      • Click Ok
  1. Click Next, and continue configuring your Plan
    • On the IP Addresses page Click Next.
      We will not provide an IP address rule. The Migrated VMs will use DHCP once recovered
    • Script VM: <Leave default>, Click Next  
    • Recovery Steps: <Leave default>, Click Next  
    • Ransomware: Leave the default and click Next
    • On the Alerts Page, click Finish
  1. Once created, click your DR Plan to review and manage it.
Task 2 - Execute a Failover

When you run a DR Plan as a failover, a running instance of the plan recovery steps launches and the plan continues to completion, or until a pause for user input, or upon encountering an error (if configured).

  1. From the Summary page of your DR Plan you created in the previous task. Click the DR Failover button
  1. In the DR Failover wizard click Next and select the following options:
    • Snapshot <Your_Previous_or_latest_Snapshot>
    • Runtime Settings: <Leave default>, click Next
    • VM Storage: Run VMs live on cloud file system, click Next
    • Preview: Review the steps to be performed as part of the Failover and click Next
  2. On the Confirmation Page Type FAILOVER in the confirmation textbox
  3. Click Start Failover
  1. Monitor the Failover process. This can take as much as 10 mins
  2. Once the Plan execution has completed without error(s), click Commit
  3. In the commit dialog:
    • Select the Checkbox to Create a failback plan
    • Select the On-Premises Datastore Protected DCXX/datastore/NFS SharedDS01
    • Type COMMIT FAILOVER
    • Click Commit
  1. Click the Reports tab at the top.  
  2. Select the radio button to select your Failover.  
  3. On the lower right, click Create PDF Report to generate and download a report of the failover execution.  This report can be used for audit and compliance purposes.
Task 3 - Review the Recovered Virtual Machine
  1. In a new Browser tab, click the VMware Cloud SDDC Chrome Bookmark
  2. If prompted, login in as
    • vmcexpert{1|2|3}-##@27virtual.net (where ## is your student number) i.e [email protected]
    • {Password-Provided-by-Instructor}
  3. In the upper right-hand corner of the Cloud Console, Click the Drop-down next to your account
  4. If required, click the Drop-down next to your username to Change organization and select Your VCDR Org (VMCEXPERTX-VCDR01)
  5. Click Open vCenter  on the VCDR SDDC Tile
  6. Click Show Credentials
  7. Copy the vCenter Password and Click Open vCenter
  1. Log into the VMC on AWS SDDC as:
  2. In the vCenter Inventory expand SDDC-Datacenter --> Cluster-1 --> Compute-ResourcePool
    to find your recovered vm <vm-studentxx> (where xx is your student number)
  3. Select <your Virtual Machine>
  4. Select the Monitor tab
  5. Click Tasks to review the vSphere tasks performed when recovering the Virtual Machine

Conclusion

VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery is VMware's on-demand disaster recovery service that is delivered as an easy-to-use SaaS solution and offers cloud economics to help keep your disaster recovery costs under control.

In the latest August Release the following features and capabilities were added:

  • Bring your existing recovery SDDC: Maximize your investment in VMware Cloud on AWS by using an existing SDDC created from the VMware Cloud console, for recovery with VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery. Clusters and hosts added to VMware Cloud DR from VMware Cloud console are automatically recognized by VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery.
  • User actions added to events list: View a log of user actions such as log in, log out, configuration changes, and DR Plan executions in the Monitor view of the VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery UI. The user ID and the source IP address are shown for each item in the Events list, enhancing your ability to audit user actions.
  • Protect workloads running in VMware Cloud Foundation: Expand your DR strategy to include protection of your virtual machines running in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.2 and newer versions.
  • DR protection for up to 2500 VMs per AWS region per VMware Cloud organization: Protect larger environments by replicating up to 2500 virtual machines to a single AWS region in a VMware Cloud organization. You might need to split 2500 VMs across multiple VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery cloud file systems for larger protected capacity scale. See VMware Configuration Maximum tool for operational scale limits of VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery.
  • Replication throughput in UI: See the network throughput of the replication data traffic between the source site and the target VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery cloud file system. The throughput can be viewed in the Dashboard Topology map and on the Protected Sites page in the VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery UI.
  • AWS Europe (Milan) region: You can now protect and recover your vSphere virtual machines in the AWS Europe (Milan) region.

 

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