Cloud disaster recovery using native, on-prem VMs

Disaster recovery (DR) has long been a fraught issue for IT. While everyone agrees that it’s necessary to have a plan in place, traditional approaches to disaster recovery are expensive, complex, and unreliable. Some might argue that the solution isn’t much of an improvement on the problem itself. That’s because data center failover touches many different components—from applications and servers to networking and storage—which makes it a complex and manual process. Testing and updating data center disaster recovery plans can also consume a lot of IT’s time and resources. 

But disaster recovery in the cloud is a completely different animal. VMware provides on-demand disaster recovery for all VMware workloads, delivered as a SaaS solution with cloud economics. What does that mean? Simply put, it allows you to buy disaster recovery as an easy-to-use product—and pay only for the compute resources required when you perform tests and when disaster strikes. 

This simple, elastic, pay as-needed approach can save a lot of time and planning. VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery provides straightforward disaster recovery for events such as ransomware attacks, power outages, or natural disasters. VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery keeps VMs in their native format to eliminate brittle VM convergence that slows down recovery—and makes failback a nightmare. 

How does cloud-based DR work?

 You begin by setting protection policies and DR run book replicas that makes sense for your business. A simple UI allows you to choose the frequency that matches your needs—every few hours, multiple times per day, or something else. 

Once setup is complete, VMware encrypts your replicas and stores them in their native VM format in the cloud. We automatically run DR health checks every 30 minutes to ensure that your plan works when it matters most. Non-disruptive recovery tests can be run as frequently as you’d like to help reduce risk. When disaster strikes, all you have to do is click a button to fail over to the cloud.  

 VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery automatically provisions SDDC VMware Cloud on AWS. The storage replicas—which could be hours, days, or weeks old—are instantly powered off via an NFS Datastore and mounted by ESX hosts in that SDDC to make recovery faster.  

There’s no learning curve for your IT team, so during a disaster or test run, teams can use the same vCenter tools they’re already familiar with to manage the cloud DR site. Once the disaster is over, failback is simple too. With a click of a button, deduplicated data is compressed, encrypted, and automatically sent back to the production data center to minimize egress charges.  

A winning combination for cloud DR

On-demand compute and efficient cloud storage in a single solution results in a low total cost of ownership and more peace of mind. How low is the cost? VMware customers have achieved up to 60% lower TCO—along with a lot more confidence that their data is safe.  

VMware provides everything you need for on-demand cloud DR in a single SaaS solution, including reliable support. As a result, your business becomes more resilient and you can stop worrying about the next disaster event. 

For more details, check out our upcoming webinar on using VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery to help combat ransomware and meet resiliency goals.