I’m often asked how to protect Virtual SAN (VSAN). Its simple, any product focused on protecting a virtual machine (VM) will work for protecting VM’s sitting on a VSAN enabled vSphere cluster. VMware offers VDP/VDPA for backup & recovery and there are many other VMware partners with backup & recovery solutions focused on protecting VM’s. Backup & Recovery is a great way to protect data but some customers like the benefit of more granular recovery points that comes from data replication either locally or to a disaster recovery site.
To protect VSAN data in a primary site to a remote disaster recovery site VMware offers vSphere Replication (VR) to replicate the VM data sitting on a VSAN Datastore over the DR site. Of course Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is supported to automate failover, failback and testing. The VR/SRM combined solution can also be used for planned data center migrations. Here are a few great write-ups on the topics:
VMware Virtual SAN Interoperability: vSphere Replication and vCenter Site Recovery Manager
Virtual SAN Interoperability – Planned migration with vSphere Replication and SRM
VSAN and vSphere Replication Interop
One of the main benefits of VR is that it will work to replicate VM data on any storage to another site with hosts connected to any other storage. So, VSAN can be the source, the target, or both.
vSphere Replication can be set to asynchronously replicate every day, hour, or up to every 15 minutes. Thus providing a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of up to 15 minutes. For many customers, this is “good enough”. For some customer workloads, asynchronous replication is not “good enough”. They need synchronous replication protection and there are several solutions in the market. One that I’ve been a big fan of for a long time is EMC’s RecoverPoint which has a great reputation for protecting enterprise mission critical data and applications. Essentially it splits every write transaction, journals it, and synchronously makes a copy of it either locally or to a remote DR site without impacting application performance. Of course there are more details but this is essentially what it does which results in being able to recover back to any point in time. Often it’s labeled as “Tivo or DVR for the data center”. One other benefit of RecoverPoint is it can replicate data from any storage to any storage, as long as there is a splitter for the storage. EMC VNX and VMAX storage arrays have splitters built in.
The big news that just came out last week that peeked my interest is that EMC is now offering a Beta of a completely software based RecoverPoint solution that embeds the splitter into vSphere. This brings the RecoverPoint benefits to any VMware customer running VM’s on any storage: block, file, or of course even VSAN. The EMC initiative is call Project Mercury and for more information check out:
Summer Gift Part 1 – Project Mercury Beta Open!
I’m excited that VSAN customers will have a choice for data protection, asynchronously with 15 minute RPO using vSphere Replication or continuous, synchronous, and asynchronous with EMC’s Virtual RecoverPoint.
Live Virtually 