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Best DR approach for Service Provider

marco_s
Userlevel 7
Badge +7

Hi guys,

first of all, hope this is not a duplicated post.

I would like to discuss about best options for DR solutions of VMware on-prem environments.

Working for a small-medium SP,  I can use our datacenters as target of Veeam Cloud Connect replicas.

Sometimes it is difficult to make a large amount of resources (cpu, ram, storage, bandwidth..) available to the customer in a short time.

Furthermore, in my opinion it is not the best approach in terms of cost optimization and resource efficiency.

One solution might be to use public clouds as a target, but using VMware the options are narrow.

What do you think about it?

Marco Sorrentino - Italy | System Engineer | VMCE & Veeam Lover

7 comments

Chris.Childerhose
Userlevel 7
Badge +20

The approach you take it dependent on your needs and it sounds like this works for you. There will be many more options come v12 like using CDP as well and this we are looking forward to ourselves.

Chris Childerhose - VMCA2022 | VMCE2023 | Veeam Vanguard 7* | Veeam Legend 3* | vExpert 5* | VCAP-DCV/VCP-DCV | Object First Ace | Cisco Champion | Twitter: @cchilderhose | Blog Site – https://just-virtualization.tech
Scott
Userlevel 7
Badge +8

Budget, expectations, and requirements really need to be sorted out before planning DR at all.

 

The place I worked wanted an entire mirror site, SRM, full DR with basically a 0 RTO, RPO and a limited budget. I explained that wasn’t realistic.

 

In the end, I moved their Test/Dev, and non critical machines to run in their DR site as the link was sub 1ms with a 10Gb pipe.   I was able to shrink the amount of servers, VMware, Veeam, and other licenses at both sites by doing this.  I set up SRM to power down the  DR VM’s in the event of a real disaster, as they wouldn’t be required then fail over prod.  

 

Every busyness will have a different solution. if you run backup copy jobs to DR, and your business only has a few servers or they aren't huge, and lets say they are ok with a few hours of down time, you could just restore those VM’s to a server at DR and it would cost you very little. 

 

DR is a tricky one as DR is not “backups”, but can utilize backups. Backups are not DR, but can be used for DR. It took a ton of planning and  finding out what every server did in the above scenario to get the boot order, find out what was ACTUALLY needed for DR and not just assumed. 

 

 

 

 

marco_s
Userlevel 7
Badge +7

Chris and Scott, thank you for your comment.

I understand the approach can depend on many conditions, and many aspects must be taken into account before planning DR.

The focus where I would like to bring this topic is to understand which solutions can be adopted as a Service Provider who wants to offer a DR service to many potential customers, paying attention to cost sustainability and efficiency of use and provision of variable hw resources.

Marco Sorrentino - Italy | System Engineer | VMCE & Veeam Lover
Chris.Childerhose
Userlevel 7
Badge +20

If you are a service provider there are a few options for Veeam -

1. VCC backup where you set up tenants and clients send backups directly to you.  Cost here is mainly on storage for the backups.

2. Replication which allows your clients to replicate their VMs to your infrastructure for failover.  This could be more costly due to HW needed to run things on your end 

3. Agent backups directly to a VCC repository is another option as well but requires tenant setup and storage.

Once v12 comes you will have CDP also which is going to be good.  Hope this helps.

Chris Childerhose - VMCA2022 | VMCE2023 | Veeam Vanguard 7* | Veeam Legend 3* | vExpert 5* | VCAP-DCV/VCP-DCV | Object First Ace | Cisco Champion | Twitter: @cchilderhose | Blog Site – https://just-virtualization.tech
Scott
Userlevel 7
Badge +8

So you are looking to provide DRaaS?

Something like this?

https://www.veeam.com/disaster-recovery-as-a-service-draas.html

https://cloud.vmware.com/providers/draas-powered

 

marco_s
Userlevel 7
Badge +7

If you are a service provider there are a few options for Veeam -

1. VCC backup where you set up tenants and clients send backups directly to you.  Cost here is mainly on storage for the backups.

2. Replication which allows your clients to replicate their VMs to your infrastructure for failover.  This could be more costly due to HW needed to run things on your end 

3. Agent backups directly to a VCC repository is another option as well but requires tenant setup and storage.

Once v12 comes you will have CDP also which is going to be good.  Hope this helps.

Obviously the common factor in everything is storage, a space to store backups or VM replicas.
I would be curious to know how the big service providers think about saving resources, but they can probably afford costs unattainable to us humans.. 😅

 

 

Marco Sorrentino - Italy | System Engineer | VMCE & Veeam Lover
marco_s
Userlevel 7
Badge +7

So you are looking to provide DRaaS?

Something like this?

https://www.veeam.com/disaster-recovery-as-a-service-draas.html

https://cloud.vmware.com/providers/draas-powered

 

Thank you Scott.

Considering only Veeam Software, might it not also make sense to introduce a DR feature to public clouds?

After all, VM recovery is already supported..

Marco Sorrentino - Italy | System Engineer | VMCE & Veeam Lover

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