Appendix C: vCloud Suite Disaster Recovery
   
Appendix C: vCloud Suite Disaster Recovery
Disaster Recovery for vCloud Director currently is described as “DR of the Cloud”. This is identified today as a full-site based failover and recovery of the entire vCloud infrastructure, including associated vApps.
vCloud Director currently lacks integration with vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM). As a result, there is no obvious way to use SRM to protect a vCloud environment from a disaster scenario by failing the site over to a recovery site.
The VMware vCloud Suite assembles existing products together in such a way as to facilitate Disaster Recovery of the vCloud from one site to another. See the following for more information about how this architecture supports DR:
*Overview of Disaster Recovery in vCloud Director
http://blogs.vmware.com/vcloud/2012/02/overview-of-disaster-recovery-in-vcloud-director.html
*VMware vCloud Director Infrastructure Resiliency Case Study
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vcloud-director-infrastructure-resiliency.pdf
The following are the most important considerations:
*Stretched Layer 2 networking (see Using VXLAN to Simplify vCloud Disaster Recovery).
*IP Changes to applications.
*Force mounting the LUNs.
*Order of management startup after SRM failover.
*vApp startup with HA.
*Failover process steps, order of operations.
*Manual versus automated steps.
This vCloud solution as described only covers the main use case of complete site-based failover. It also requires the configuration to handle the failover of an entire provider virtual datacenter. Although this does not in any way prevent a provider from having unprotected virtual datacenters
Dealing with Disaster Recovery of the cloud has some design implications. Referencing the architecture documentation will help understand vlCloud Disaster Recovery design implications If a vCloud design already exists, changes may need to be made to the design to support the current Disaster Recovery solution.