In today’s digital landscape, business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) are critical for organizations to ensure seamless operations and minimize downtime during unexpected disruptions. VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) has long been a go-to solution for orchestrating disaster recovery and migration within VMware environments.
Now, Oracle Cloud integrates seamlessly with VMware SRM to offer an enhanced platform that ensures high availability, robust recovery, and a simplified experience for organizations seeking to manage their virtual machine workloads effectively.
Overview of VMWare Site Recovery Manager (SRM)
VMware Site Recovery Manager is an extension to VMware vCenter that provides disaster recovery, site migration, and non-disruptive testing capabilities to VMware customers. It is fully integrated with VMware vCenter Server and utilizes an HTML5 based “Clarity” UI.
Site Recovery Manager works in conjunction with various replication solutions including VMware vSphere Replication™ to automate the process of migrating, recovering, testing, re-protecting, and failing-back virtual machine workloads.
Site Recovery Manager servers coordinate the operations of the VMware vCenter Server™ at two sites. This is so that as virtual machines at the protected site are shut down, copies of these virtual machines at the recovery site startup. By using the data replicated from the protected site these virtual machines assume responsibility for providing the same services.
Migration of protected inventory and services from one site to the other is controlled by a recovery plan that specifies the order in which virtual machines are shut down and started up, the resource pools to which they are allocated, and the networks they can access. Site Recovery Manager enables the testing of recovery plans, using a temporary copy of the replicated data, and isolated networks in a way that does not disrupt ongoing operations at either site. Multiple recovery plans can be configured to migrate individual applications and entire sites providing finer control over what virtual machines are failed over and failed back. This also enables flexible testing schedules.
Site Recovery Manager extends the feature set of the virtual infrastructure platform to provide for rapid business continuity through partial or complete site failures.
Here are some key points about SRM:
- Planned Migration
- During a planned migration, SRM synchronizes the virtual machine data from the protected site to the recovery site.
- It attempts to gracefully shut down the protected virtual machines and performs a final synchronization to prevent data loss.
- Afterward, it powers on the virtual machines at the recovery site.
- If errors occur during migration, the plan stops for resolution before rerunning.
- You can reprotect the virtual machines after successful migration.
- Disaster Recovery
- In a disaster recovery scenario, SRM first attempts storage synchronization.
- If successful, it uses the synchronized storage state to recover virtual machines on the recovery site.
- The recovery is based on the most recent available state, according to the recovery point objective (RPO) set during replication configuration.
- If SRM cannot shut down virtual machines on the protected site, it still powers on the copies at the recovery site.
- In case the protected site comes back online after disaster recovery, SRM detects this and allows you to run the plan again to power off the virtual machines on the protected site.
- This ensures consistency and enables subsequent reprotect operations.
Advantages of Oracle Cloud Integration with VMware SRM
- Cost Optimization: Oracle Cloud offers a pay-as-you-go model, which eliminates the need for over-provisioning infrastructure for disaster recovery. By using Oracle’s scalable storage and compute resources, businesses can adjust their DR environment based on real-time needs, avoiding the burden of maintaining idle infrastructure.
- Enhanced Security: Leveraging Oracle’s enterprise-grade security features like identity management, encryption, and OCI Security services ensures a highly secure disaster recovery environment. Oracle Cloud enhances SRM’s native capabilities, adding extra layers of protection for sensitive data during recovery operations.
- High Availability: Oracle’s OCI offers a global infrastructure with high availability and disaster recovery solutions, ensuring that critical workloads are available during planned or unplanned disruptions.
- Seamless Integration: With Oracle Cloud supporting VMware SRM, businesses benefit from a seamless integration that requires minimal changes to existing IT infrastructure. This compatibility ensures that organizations do not need to overhaul their VMware-based DR strategies.
Key Features and Architectural Overview
- Planned Migration and Automated Recovery: Oracle Cloud’s support for VMware SRM ensures automated orchestration of planned migrations and disaster recovery. Organizations can execute DR plans with minimal disruption, automating the failover process from the protected VMware vCenter site to Oracle Cloud-based recovery sites. This reduces the manual intervention required, ensuring quicker recovery times and lower risks of human error.
- Integration with vSphere Replication: Oracle Cloud utilizes VMware’s vSphere Replication in conjunction with SRM to replicate virtual machines to the recovery site. This provides a cost-effective alternative to traditional storage array-based replication by using native hypervisor-based replication. With vSphere Replication, Oracle Cloud ensures that replicated virtual machines are stored efficiently, while offering granular control over recovery points (RPOs) and recovery times (RTOs).
- Multi-Site Failover and Failback: Oracle Cloud facilitates multi-site failover and failback operations, ensuring that workloads can be moved between on-premises data centers and Oracle Cloud. This flexibility allows businesses to quickly recover virtual machines in Oracle Cloud in case of a disaster at the primary data center.
- Non-Disruptive Testing: A major advantage of integrating VMware SRM with Oracle Cloud is the ability to perform non-disruptive testing of disaster recovery plans. Oracle Cloud enables organizations to test their SRM configurations without affecting ongoing operations, providing assurance that the recovery process will function smoothly when needed.
Terminology
Recovery time objective (RTO): Targeted amount of time a business process should be restored after a disaster or disruption to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in business continuity.
Recovery point objective (RPO): Maximum age of files recovered from backup storage for normal operations to resume if a system goes offline because of a hardware, program, or communications failure.
Protected site: Site that contains protected virtual machines.
Recovery site: Site where protected virtual machines are recovered in the event of a failover.
Architectural Overview
Site Recovery Manager is deployed in a paired configuration, for example, protected site and recovery site.
Site Recovery Manager is deployed in a paired configuration, for example, a protected site and a recovery site. The Site Recovery Manager software is deployed as an appliance at both sites. It supports multiple versions of vCenter at either site. There must be one or more vSphere hosts running version 6.5 or higher at each site. See the Compatibility Matrixes for Site Recovery Manager for specific details
Use of vSphere Replication in Oracle Cloud:
1. Storage Agnostic Replication
vSphere Replication in Oracle Cloud eliminates the need for proprietary storage solutions, making it a flexible and cost-effective option. By replicating virtual machines at the hypervisor level, organizations can use any storage device that is compatible with VMware, enabling more versatile disaster recovery scenarios.
2. Point-in-Time Snapshots
With vSphere Replication, Oracle Cloud supports multiple point-in-time snapshots, allowing businesses to retain several versions of a virtual machine. This enables users to choose the most appropriate snapshot to restore from, based on their Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
3. Consistent and Reliable Failover
Oracle Cloud ensures that failover operations triggered by vSphere Replication are consistent, and the data is in sync with the recovery site’s state. This consistency guarantees that critical applications and services resume quickly without manual intervention.
Site Recovery Manager Architecture with vSphere Replication
In an increasingly unpredictable world, ensuring business continuity through disaster recovery is not just a safety measure but a business imperative. Oracle Cloud’s seamless integration with VMware Site Recovery Manager enhances the capabilities of SRM by providing an optimized, secure, and cost-efficient cloud environment for businesses to protect their critical virtual machine workloads.
By leveraging Oracle Cloud’s global infrastructure, scalable services, and high-performance computing resources, organizations can ensure rapid recovery, high availability, and minimal downtime. This synergy between Oracle Cloud and VMware SRM delivers tangible business benefits, reducing operational risks and enabling organizations to maintain the continuity and resilience of their services in the face of unexpected disruptions.
Incorporating this solution into your disaster recovery strategy empowers your business with an intelligent, future-ready approach to operational resilience.
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