Disaster recovery with VMware Live Site Recovery explained

The business world is full of holy grails. One of the easiest to wrap your head around is business continuity – or, to be more precise, an effective business continuity strategy.

Business continuity is your ability to bounce back from a disaster. It's not much different from the plans we put in place in our personal lives. You take steps to ensure downtime is kept to a minimum.

For businesses, the need to get back on the saddle has financial and reputational incentives. Business continuity safeguards you against unnecessary financial loss and lets your employees, partners and clients know you're still open for business.

VMware Live Site Recovery (formerly VMware Site Recovery Site Manager) is a powerful piece of software built to ensure business continuity in the event of a digital disaster.

It does this by automating and orchestrating failover (switching to a standby) and failback (restoring operations). In plain English, this means it keeps downtime to a bare minimum.

So, how does it work – and what are the benefits? Let's find out.

How does VMware Live Site Recovery work?

VMware Live Site Recovery is a disaster recovery solution to ensure business continuity. It allows IT professionals to plan, test and run the recovery of virtual machines (VMs). It can be configured in the following ways:

Datastore groups
Individual VMs
Virtual volumes

VMs can be recovered from the protected site to the recovery site in two main ways: planned migration and disaster recovery.

In the words of VMware, planned migration is "the orderly evacuation of virtual machines from the protected site to the recovery site", with both sites running. By contrast, disaster recovery can be executed without both sites running.

In the event of a disaster, VMware Live Site Recovery minimises data loss and system downtime by shutting down VMs and synchronising storage on the protected site. It then powers on the replicated VMs on the recovery site.

It does this according to a recovery plan. The recovery plan includes a number of things:

The order in which the VMs are powered on
Network parameters (e.g. IP addresses)
User-specified scripts

On top of this, VMware Live Site Recovery lets you test your recovery plans using a temporary copy of the replicated data.

Because the test is run with a temporary copy, neither the protected site nor the recovery site is affected. This means you can carry out tests during the working day without fear of interruptions.

That's how it works. Now, what are the benefits for your business?

What are the benefits of VMware Live Site Recovery for your business?

There are multiple benefits of VMware Live Site Recovery for your business. In our view, these are:

Non-disruptive testing. VMware Live Site Recovery lets you test recovery plans even during business hours, meaning no disruption to your day-to-day operations.
Speed of recovery. It reduces recovery time to minutes with automated and orchestrated failover for thousands of VMs
Flexibility. It can be flexibly deployed and replicated between on-premises data centres or to VMware Cloud on AWS.
Continuity. Live migration of VMs at scale across sites means zero-downtime application mobility.
Safety. VMs are isolated during recovery to prevent reinfection.
Familiarity. It gives IT professionals a familiar vSphere environment – no need to retrain or retool.
No need for manual runbooks. Up to thousands of VMs (see operational limits here) can be protected with centralised recovery plans.
Investment protection. Investments and tailored recovery point objectives (RPOs) can be protected using supported replication.
Scalability. Data can be protected at scale – up to four cloud file systems per recovery SDDC.

VMware Live Site Recovery vs VMware Live Cyber Recovery: which is the right solution for you?

Deciding between VMware Live Site Recovery and VMware Live Cyber Recovery (formerly VMware Cloud DR) depends on several factors. These factors relate to the nature of your site (on-premise or cloud), whether you need disaster or ransomware recovery (or both), and your RPO.

You can, however, use both solutions together for the same VMs as part of the VMware Live Recovery solution.

What are the system requirements for VMware Live Site Recovery?

To use VMware Live Site Recovery, you'll need VMware Site Recovery Manager 9.0 or a later version. You'll also need two vCPUs, 8GB of RAM, one 16GB hard disk, one 4GB hard disk and a 1Gb network card. These requirements change if you want to protect more than 1,000 VMs.

How is VMware Live Site Recovery different from VMware Site Recovery Manager?

VMware Live Site Recovery is the rebranded and revamped version of VMware Site Recovery Manager. It's now part of the VMware Live Recovery software bundle and can't be configured without Site Recovery Manager (version 9 or later).

Site Recovery Manager focused on the on-premises orchestration of array-based or host-based replication. Live Site Recovery augments this with a unified SaaS-based management console and improved integration with hybrid cloud environments.

How has disaster recovery changed?

Disaster recovery used to be all about restoring lost data after a disaster. Today, the focus is on operational continuity.

This is achieved in a number of ways. First, there's been a shift from on-premise backup sites to disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) solutions.

Secondly, more and more manual recovery processes have been replaced – and continue to be replaced – by automated, orchestrated workflows such as automated failover.

These trends show no signs of abating – and VMware Live Site Recovery is a great example of how disaster recovery software is moving forward to adapt to a changing world.

At Ascend Cloud Solutions, we empower cloud-first businesses with intelligent, scalable strategies – including cloud backup strategies. Want to discuss how our expertise can give you more peace of mind? Don't hesitate to get in touch with our team.

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