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:
The following are the most important considerations:
Stretched L
ayer 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.