The vCloud consumer resources (workloads or vApps) can be failed over to an alternate site, but VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) cannot be used. Though SRM is vCenter Server-aware, it is not vCloud Director-aware. Without collaboration between vCloud Director and SRM, the underlying mechanisms that synchronize virtual machines cannot be used to keep vCloud consumer resources in sync.

A solution for vCloud consumer workload disaster recovery is to use storage replication. Storage replication can be used to replicate LUNs that contain vCloud consumer workloads from the protected site to the recovery site. Because the LUN/datastores containing vCloud consumer workloads cannot currently be managed by SRM, manual steps might be required during failover. Depending on the type of storage used, these steps could potentially be automated by leveraging storage system API calls.

Operationally, Recovery Point Objectives support must be determined for consumer workloads and included in any consumer Service Level Agreements. This, along with the distance between the protected and recovery sites, helps determine the type of storage replication to use for consumer workloads: synchronous or asynchronous.

For more information about vCloud management cluster disaster recovery, see http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vcloud-director-infrastructure-resiliency.pdf.