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?

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 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