VMware Disaster Recovery Expert Checklist for VMware DR Planning
Sean Clark
Twitter: @vSeanClark
Blog: seanclark.us
VMware vExpert, VCP
Administrative points on this webinar
Questions ● Can use the virtual Q&A panel.
● This webinar is recorded and available for replay after a few days.
● At the end of the webinar, we can raise virtual hand for dialog questions.
● Stick around until the end of the webinar!
− Winners will receive a choice of books!
Overview of Veeam
About Veeam
Veeam Software develops innovative products
for virtual infrastructure management
and data protection.
Reduce costs, mitigate risk, and fully realize the promise
of virtualization with Veeam.
DR Planning Sanity Check
Intro
Assessing DR Needs
Design for VMware DR
Strategic Design
Back to Rick
May 2011 Tornado - Joplin, MO
Japan Tsunami - March 2011
It will never happen to us...
We don’t live in tsunami affected area.
Tornados have never hit our town.
Paying for your recovery site doesn’t increase our
revenues.
You have backups on tape so we’re okay.
It’s okay, we have RAID.
Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?
Phased Approach
Assessment - Gathering key requirements for DR
solution
Design - Creating a DR plan to meet business and
technical requirements
Deploy - Stand up necessary infrastructure. Install,
configure and test solution
Manage - Regularly test your DR plan as frequently as
possible
DR Planning should be Business Focused
Key BIA activities
1. Identify critical business systems
2. Identify system resource dependencies
3. Identify key support personnel or teams
4. Estimate disruption impact
5. Determine resource recovery priority
Free BIA template put out by the Centers for Disease
Control (CDC)
BIA Template
Determine RPO and RTO
RPO -> Recovery Point Objective ● How many hours of data loss tolerated
● How much data doesn’t need re-entered
− Affects BRTO – Business Recovery Time Objective
RTO -> Recovery Time Objective ● How many hours after disaster declaration that service must be restored
● Relates directly to ease of recovery and DR test
Guides specific DR designs
Use Cases Drive RPO and RTO
Understand your business
Education – K-12 ● RPO of 24-48 hours acceptable
● RTO of days-week probably acceptable
Accounting firm ● Tax Season - RPO/RTO of < 1 hour
● After Tax Season – RPO/RTO of 24-48 hours
Healthcare ● Patient care systems – RPO/RTO of near-zero
− …but budget dictates how low you can go
● Back office systems – RPO/RTO of 24-48 hours
● Budget will dictate how low you can go
Understand your Budget
How big is your “stack of chips”?
Create some wiggle room in the budget ● Consolidate DR in one system
● Re-use DR for Test/Dev
● Sacrificial lambs
Communicate vision ● 100% virtualized
● Completely test-driven DR
Executive Champion ● C-level decoder ring built in
Understand App Dependencies
AD, DNS, DHCP, Firewall
Mission critical apps ● Physical server dependencies?
● UNIX or mainframe?
● Database consistency – VSS?
Stateless app servers ● Redeploy in Disaster
● Protect the deployment systems
Client access ● Consider VDI solutions for DR
access
● Protect VDI infrastructure but
redeploy desktops
Automate Data Collection
Veeam Reporter ● Document virtual environment automatically
● Base for DR documentation
Veeam Monitor ● Determine resources needed to power DR
Veeam Backup and Replication POC ● Data change rate
● Evaluate WAN performance
● Test a product that can meet needs
VMware Partners have tools/scripts to assess
environment
Analyze Resource Requirements
Compute ● Size to handle protected workloads
● Size for some performance degradation or none
Storage ● Daily change rate
● Separate swap/page files or note
Network ● Can your WAN handle it?
● Can budget pay for added bandwidth?
● Truck full O’ tapes may be more economical
WAN acceleration ● Can shorten backup windows
● HyperIp from Netex
● Free 2Mb/s subscription for Veeam customers
Design for Easiest Restore
Co-Lo, self-host or dare we say….Cloud?
Server hardware ● Roll over old ESX servers into DR
● Invest in beefy servers to reduce licensing
Storage ● Local storage for DR is cheaper
● Works with Veeam
Network ● Invest in bandwidth to facilitate replication
● Fall back to tapes/disks in a truck
DR in the cloud or self-host ● Self-host is cheaper than co-lo if you have the facilities
● Why pay for DR infrastructure if not using?
Test-driven DR plan
TTD or Test-Driven Development works for software so
why not DR?
Design with testing in mind
Veeam SureBackup recovery verification
Enables continuous testing
DR magic brought to you by the letters…
VMs make DR easy (easier)!
V and M
Why make DR harder than it has to be?
I’m all for challenges but….
100% Virtualization Soapbox
Consolidate platforms ● Virtualized x86 is winning the battle on cost
● Add DR simplicity and accelerate the trend
Get critical servers on VMs for DR
Consider nuclear option: 1 VM per ESX
SureBackup and On Demand Sandboxing not possible
with other platforms
More reasons to go “All-in” with Virtual DR
VMware vSphere 5 ● 32 vCPU, 1TB RAM
● Storage DRS
● No workloads are off-limits
Veeam vPower v6 ● Enterprise scalability
● Dynamic scale-out capability
● 1-click File Restore
● Advanced Replication
● Advanced application integration
Questions and Answers Winners receive a choice of the following books
Thank you for attending!
Resources: ● Twitter @Veeam Blog: http://www.veeam.com/blog Eval: Veeam.com