VMware Live Site Recovery is a business continuity and disaster recovery solution.
VMware Live Site Recovery helps you to plan, test, and run the recovery of virtual machines between a protected vCenter Server site and a recovery vCenter Server site.
You can configure VMware Live Site Recovery to protect virtual machines in different ways.
- Datastore groups
- Protect the virtual machines in datastore groups by using third-party disk replication mechanisms to configure array-based replication. Array-based replication surfaces replicated datastores to recover virtual machine workloads.
- Individual virtual machines
- Protect the individual virtual machines on a host by using VMware Live Site Recovery in combination with VMware vSphere Replication.
- VMware Virtual Volumes
- Virtual Volumesreplication is policy driven. After you configure your Virtual Volumes storage for replication, information about replication capabilities and replication groups is delivered from the array by the storage provider. This information shows in the VM Storage Policy interface of vCenter Server. You use the VM storage policy to describe replication requirements for your virtual machines. The parameters that you specify in the storage policy depend on how your array implements replication.
You can use VMware Live Site Recovery to implement different types of recovery from the protected site to the recovery site.
- Planned migration
- The orderly evacuation of virtual machines from the protected site to the recovery site. Planned migration prevents data loss when migrating workloads in an orderly fashion. For planned migration to succeed, both sites must be running and fully functioning.
- Disaster recovery
- Similar to planned migration except that disaster recovery does not require that both sites be up and running, for example if the protected site goes offline unexpectedly. During a disaster recovery operation, failure of operations on the protected site is reported but is otherwise ignored.
VMware Live Site Recovery orchestrates the recovery process with the replication mechanisms, to minimize data loss and system down time.
- At the protected site, VMware Live Site Recovery shuts down virtual machines cleanly and synchronizes storage, if the protected site is still running.
- VMware Live Site Recovery powers on the replicated virtual machines at the recovery site according to a recovery plan.
A recovery plan specifies the order in which virtual machines start up on the recovery site. A recovery plan specifies network parameters, such as IP addresses, and can contain user-specified scripts that VMware Live Site Recovery can run to perform custom recovery actions on virtual machines.
VMware Live Site Recovery lets you test recovery plans. You conduct tests by using a temporary copy of the replicated data in a way that does not disrupt ongoing operations at either site.
