If you aren't sure which solution to use, you can use the VMware Live Recovery Solutions Guide to help you decide.
Which VMware Live Recovery solution is right for you?
- If you need disaster or ransomware recovery, or both.
- If you are protecting an on-premises site or cloud site.
- If you need to perform recovery operations on-premises or in a cloud site.
- How quickly your organization needs to recover in the event of a disaster or ransomware attack (recovery point objective or RPO).
With the Solutions Guide, click the items on the page according to your needs and requirements. When you click some options, some will gray out, indicating which features are compatible with each other.
Use cases
- Ransomware Recovery: VMware Live Cyber Recovery provides an isolated recovery environment (IRE) on a VMware Cloud on AWS recovery SDDC that allows you to inspect, analyze, recover, and validate that infected VMs are safe to restore to a production environment.
Note: VMware Live Site Recovery does not provide ransomware recovery protection.
- Disaster Recovery. VMware Live Site Recovery offers host-based replication from vSphere Replication, or array-based or VMware Virtual Volumes replication, plus the orchestration of Site Recovery Manager.
VMware Live Cyber Recovery allows you to replicate standard and high-frequency snapshots to the cloud file system, which are leveraged by recovery plans for disaster recovery failover and failback operations.
Note: For a detailed comparison between disaster and ransomware recovery, see Ransomware Recovery and Disaster Recovery.
Protected sites:
A protected site is where you running a VMware vCenter Server that you want to protect using VMware Live Recovery. Types of protected sites include:
- On-premises vSphere
- VMware Cloud on AWS
- Google Cloud VMware Engine
Recovery Sites
A recovery site is where you failover protected VMs to. You can choose between an on-premises site, or a cloud site, depending on your business needs.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO):
RPO is the acceptable amount of data loss after a disaster or attack. It is measured in the time a data center is allowed to be down. When you set a RPO value during replication configuration, you determine the maximum data loss that you can tolerate; for example 5 days, or 5 hours.
Every organization has different RPO needs, according to their business policies. Choose as low as one minute.
Choosing between VMware Live Site Recovery and VMware Live Cyber Recovery can depend on the RPO your organization needs:
| VMware Live Site Recovery RPO | VMware Live Cyber Recovery RPO |
|---|---|
| As low as 1 minute. VMware Live Site Recovery supports RPOs as low as 1 minute, when using vSphere Replication, or as low as 0 RPO if using array-based replication or VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols) with syncronous storage replication. |
As low as 15 minutes. VMware VMware Live Cyber Recovery supports RPO as low as 15 minutes for VMs replicated by high-frequency snapshots, and also supports longer RPO every half hour, hourly, daily, or monthly. VMware Live Cyber Recovery standard frequency snapshots provide as low as 30 minute RPO. |
