Good practices at the infrastructure level lead to easier disaster recovery of the management cluster. This includes technologies such as HA and DRS for reactive and proactive protection at the primary site. VMware vCenter Heartbeat™ can also be used to protect vCenter Server, specifically, at the primary site. For multi-site protection of virtual machines, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is a VMware solution that works well for this use case, because the management virtual machines are not part of a vCloud instance of any type (they run the vCloud instances). For a detailed description of using SRM to provide disaster recovery solution for the management cluster, see http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vcloud-director-infrastructure-resiliency.pdf.

Disaster Recovery operational considerations for the vCloud management cluster are the same as for a virtualized environment. A vCloud infrastructure risk assessment must be undertaken to determine the threat risk exposure and the corresponding mitigation activities. The actions necessary for executing the mitigation activities, including those for the management cluster, should be captured in a vCloud Infrastructure Continuity Plan. After the vCloud infrastructure disaster recovery planning and technical implementation are complete, awareness building, disaster recovery training, disaster recovery testing and review/adjustment should be considered part of ongoing vCloud operations.

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5 can perform a disaster recovery workflow test of the Cloud management cluster. This can be useful to verify that the steps taken to move the Cloud management stack from the protected site to the recovery site complete without fail. But, the SRM test feature is only validation of the workflow, not functional testing of connectivity (due to the fencing feature that is used to protect the production vCloud management cluster).