If your organization has a limited budget, it is possible to use VMware Live Cyber Recovery recovery plans in a 'Just-in-time' mode.
'Just-in-time' is a type of configuration where you only deploy a recovery SDDC just at the time of disaster. Because deploying an SDDC costs money, you might only want to deploy (and start paying for) the SDDC at the time of a disaster strikes. A just-in-time deployment is also useful for occasional DR testing activities.
Using
recovery plan in
VMware Live Cyber Recovery for a 'Just-in-time' DR has some restrictions:
- A recovery SDDC must be created before you can fully configure and run the plan.
- Once the required recovery plans are created, you can delete the recovery SDDC to save on costs
- Creating the recovery SDDC is a manual task and can take up to a couple of hours to complete, so factor this into your overall RTO planning for 'Just-in-time' disaster scenarios.
- After the SDDC is deleted, you do not have to deactivate the plan. You have the option to deactivate the plan, but once deactivated no more compliance checks are run on the plan.
- When a new SDDC is created to use for the original recovery plan, then you must manually reconfigure all of its resources, networks, folders, vSphere tags.
- For compliance checks and the failover or test to work properly, the new SDDC must have an identical cluster geometry, network layout, folder structure, and tags as the previous SDDC used in the plan, or the failover will not work.
