Over 90% of organizations experience unplanned downtime at some point, with an average cost of $9,000 per minute. Disaster recovery is an essential component of a data loss prevention strategy for any virtualized infrastructure. VMware users can automate various disaster recovery processes from the protected site to the recovery site with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). It can be deployed both on-premises and as a disaster recovery solution in suitable cloud environments, providing high availability and business continuity.
Virtualized environments are highly resilient to hardware failures due to built-in redundancy and replication tools like vSphere Replication. However, disaster recovery planning remains a top and blooming concern for IT teams. VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) fights these risks by providing policy-driven automation for failover and failback, which eventually reduces downtime and data loss.
This post will help you begin your disaster recovery journey by showing you how to use VMware Site Recovery Manager to backup and recover virtual machines efficiently.
vSphere Replication for Virtual Machines Recovery and Backup
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM), a specialized disaster recovery tool. It is a critical component of the vSphere virtualization suite. SRM is a VMware backup automation and disaster recovery orchestration solution that facilitates policy-based backup program management and integrates with native replication technologies.
SRM provides hypervisor-based virtual machine replication through VMware vSphere Replication, guaranteeing robust protection against partial or complete site failures. It facilitates seamless VM failover by transferring virtual machines from a primary site to a secondary site or consolidating multiple sources into a single disaster recovery location.
vSphere Replication operates asynchronously and supports
Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) as low as five minutes, which provides minimal data loss in case of failure. It is configured per-VM, giving granular control over replication. After the initial replication, vSphere Replication performs incremental data transfers, optimizing network bandwidth usage by transmitting only the modified data blocks.
Benefits of using vSphere Replication with SRM
VMware Site Recovery transfers virtual machine data between sites using vSphere Replication. vSphere Replication supports any storage compatible with vSphere, which smartly eliminates the need for storage arrays at either location.
Key Benefits of vSphere Replication with SRM:
● Create Flexible Configurations.
● Set the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) to anywhere between five minutes and twenty-four hours based on requirements.
● Multiple Point-in-Time (MPIT) Recovery can be used to restore virtual machines to earlier known states.
● Get rid of storage lock-in.
● Use Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for application-consistent snapshots in Windows environments.
● Use the Linux file system quiescing feature to ensure consistent backups.
● Enable data compression to further reduce network bandwidth usage.
How to Backup And Recover Virtual Machines Using Vmware SRM?
Follow the given steps to back up and recover your virtual machines using VMware Site Recovery Manager:
Protection Groups
A protection group consists of virtual machines that support applications or services and work together to provide a specific function. For example, a database cluster of two servers, three application servers, and four web servers could make up an application. The main advantage of creating a protection group for every service or application is that it allows for selective testing. Protection groups also make sure that dependencies among virtual machines are maintained, reducing the risk of service disruptions during failover events.
Recovery Plans
VMware Site Recovery (SR) Recovery Plans regulate every stage of the recovery process, acting as an automated playbook. They can be integrated into multiple recovery plans and contain one or more protection groups. The recovery plan has the following customizable options:
● Priority Groups: VMware Site Recovery has five priority groups. Recovery begins with the virtual machines in priority group one, followed by those in priority group two, and so on. This structured approach assures that critical applications recover first, preventing service disruptions.
● Dependencies: Dependencies can be used when a higher level of granularity is required for startup order. A dependency states that before a virtual machine can start, another virtual machine must already be functioning. This ensures that database and application servers start before front-end web servers, preventing service failures.
● Shutdown and Startup Actions: During the execution of a recovery plan, the protected virtual machines at the protected site are subject to shutdown actions. By default, VMware Site Recovery will perform a guest operating system shutdown, which has a five-minute time limit and requires VMware Tools. It is possible to change the time limit. The virtual machine shuts down if the guest OS shutdown fails and the time limit is reached. This controlled shutdown process prevents data corruption and provides a clean failover.
● Pre and Post Power-On Steps: After turning on a recovered virtual machine, VMware Site Recovery can execute a command on it as part of a recovery plan. This is useful for running custom scripts, initializing services, or verifying application health before full recovery.
● IP Customization: IP customization is the most commonly modified virtual machine recovery property. VMware Site Recovery can automatically modify the network settings (IP address, default gateway, etc.) of the virtual network interface card(s) in a virtual machine when it fails over. This functionality applies to both failover and failback operations. Automated IP customization ensures seamless connectivity in multi-site DR environments without manual intervention.
Testing and Cleanup
After creating a recovery strategy, it is important to test it to ensure it works exactly as expected. VMware Site Recovery includes a non-disruptive testing mechanism that enables testing at any time. This isolated recovery testing feature allows organizations to validate failover plans without affecting production workloads. It is common for an organization to verify a recovery plan several times after it is created to fix any problems that may have occurred during the initial testing.
Planned Migration and Disaster Recovery
Testing a recovery plan does not affect virtual machines on the protected site. Before the recovery procedure starts at the recovery site, VMware Site Recovery will try to shut down virtual machines at the protected site while executing a recovery plan. Recovery plans are executed when a planned migration is desired or when a disaster occurs, and failover is necessary. You have to choose between disaster recovery and a planned migration when you click the Run Recovery Plan button on the VMC/SDDC console.
A planned migration is the default option, and it includes the following actions:
- Try to synchronize the storage of the virtual machine.
- Turn off the virtual machines that are protected. As the virtual machines complete the shutdown procedure, this effectively stops them and stores any final modifications to the disk.
- To duplicate any modifications made while the virtual machines were shut down, synchronize storage again.
- Replication is carried out twice to reduce downtime and data loss. Planned migrations minimize downtime and prevent data inconsistencies by providing an orderly transition between sites.
Re-Protect and Failback
After the VMs have failed over to the DR site and workloads are operating normally, you must ensure that the primary site is operational and then replicate the most recent copy of these workloads back to the production/primary site. This reverse replication process ensures that the primary site remains ready for subsequent failovers.
SRM has a feature called Re-Protect, which is used when the primary site is prepared to receive the most recent modifications to workload VMs from the DR site. Before restarting workloads on the primary site, use Re-Protect to sync the most recent data from the recovery site.
It is not possible to quickly fail a recovery plan from the recovery site back to the original protected site. The recovery strategy must first go through a Re-Protect workflow. This operation includes reversing replication and reconfiguring the recovery plan to run in the other direction. Failback is essential for ensuring business continuity and should be tested as rigorously as failover.
Bottom Line
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is a solid disaster recovery management tool that strategically automates the failover and failback process. It bestows a seamless disaster recovery solution for virtual environments by integrating with VMware vSphere. SRM functions by automating the execution of recovery plans and managing the replication of data and virtual machines across sites.
SRM ensures data security and business continuity with features like centralized management and non-disruptive testing. Businesses can simplify disaster recovery management and reduce downtime by utilizing SRM.
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