Recoverability is measured by two primary metrics - 1. Recovery Point Objective (RPO): the amount of data loss an organization can tolerate and 2. Recovery Time Objective (RTO): the amount of downtime an organization can tolerate.
RPO is a point in time where a VMware Cloud SDDC and an organization’s Workloads and applications can be restored. RTO is the amount of time it takes to restore a VMware Cloud SDDC and an organization’s Workloads and applications after a failure.
Designing for Recoverability
The VMware Cloud Provider is responsible for the recoverability of the VMware Cloud SDDC management Virtual Machines. However, simply relying on the virtual infrastructure SLA may not be sufficient on meeting the application requirements. An organization must be prepared for individual Virtual Machine failures by designing a proper disaster recovery and backup solution.
For disaster recovery planning, applications should be grouped based on business criticality, RPO/RTO requirements, and application dependencies. The recovery process should prioritize mission-critical applications with lower RTOs. Inter-dependent applications should be recovered together to ensure proper functionality. It is important to choose an appropriate disaster recovery solution based on the application RPO requirements. To meet a lower RTO, an organization can automate the recovery process such as Virtual Machine failover and failback.
Tools such as VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery and VMware Site Recovery can provide disaster recovery capabilities for a VMware Cloud SDDC.
In addition, proper monitoring must be in place to ensure that a Virtual Machine or an application failure is detected as soon as possible. The monitoring tool can be configured to alert on specific infrastructure and/or application issues and provides a means to notify the responsible recipients.
Workloads and/or application-level backups are critical to having a comprehensive disaster recovery solution. Backup retention policies and backup job scheduling should be configured to meet an organization’s RPO requirements. Appropriate network connectivity with sufficient bandwidth should be provisioned to ensure backup jobs do not affect production traffic. A backup window should be scheduled outside of normal business hours to avoid impact to production workloads. Backups should be stored offsite, in a different location from where the workloads are residing in. An organization should regularly test and validate backups to ensure proper workload recoverability.
A VMware Cloud SDDC can also be used as a disaster recovery destination for an on-premises environment. An organization should have appropriate network connectivity to ensure their users can continue to access their workloads after a disaster has been declared. A plan should be in place for an organization to fail back workloads to their original location once the infrastructure has been restored. An organization should regularly test and failover workloads to and from a VMware Cloud SDDC to validate their disaster recovery procedures.
In the next section, learn about managing and accessing costs for cloud infrastructure providers.
