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 dont live in tsunami affected area. Tornados have never hit our town. Paying for your recovery site doesnt increase our revenues. You have backups on tape so were okay. Its okay, we have RAID. Whos afraid of the big bad wolf?

But beware the Humans!

Source: 2008 Accenture Survey

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 doesnt 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

and

VMs make DR easy (easier)!

Why make DR harder than it has to be?

Im 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