The logical design provides a high-level overview of the Site Protection and Disaster Recovery for VMware Cloud Foundation validated solution. Critical SDDC management applications and services must remain operational in the event of a disaster. These management applications are running as virtual machines, and can have dependencies on applications and services that run in both VMware Cloud Foundation instances.

To provide failover capabilities, this validated solution defines the following logical configuration of the SDDC management components:

Table 1. Logical Configuration for Disaster Recovery in the SDDC

Management Component

Logical Configuration for Disaster Recovery

VMware Cloud Foundation instances and ESXi hosts

  • The protected VMware Cloud Foundation instance has a management cluster of ESXi hosts that runs the virtual machines that must be protected.

  • The recovery VMware Cloud Foundation instance has a management cluster of ESXi hosts with sufficient capacity to host the virtual machines from the protected VMware Cloud Foundation instance in case of failover.

vCenter Server

Each VMware Cloud Foundation instance has a vCenter Server instance for the management domain.

Site Recovery Manager

  • Each VMware Cloud Foundation instance has a Site Recovery Manager server with an embedded database. 

  • In each VMware Cloud Foundation instance, Site Recovery Manager is integrated with the management domain vCenter Server. 

vSphere Replication

  • vSphere Replication provides hypervisor-based virtual machine replication between VMware Cloud Foundation instances. 

  • vSphere Replication replicates data from the protected VMware Cloud Foundation instance to the recovery VMware Cloud Foundation instance by using a dedicated VMkernel.
Figure 1. Site Protection and Disaster Recovery Logical Design
Each VMware Cloud Foundation instance has a Site Recovery Manager server with an embedded database, integrated with the management domain vCenter Server. Each VMware Cloud Foundation instance has a vSphere Replication server that provides hypervisor-based virtual machine replication and is integrated with the Site Recovery Manager instance. vSphere Replication replicates data from the protected VMware Cloud Foundation instance to the recovery VMware Cloud Foundation instance by using a dedicated VMkernel.