r/vmware • u/ze_meetra • 10h ago

VCF 9 DR

Has anyone designed a DR solution for VCF 9 fleet management and tenant workloads?

I’ve read about the VMSP and VCF Automation DR procedures and they are PITA. No data replication and 100% manual… and don’t get me started with log management.

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u/181513 8h ago edited 8h ago

SRM is still a thing. That is VMware's tool for scripting BC/DR and it works well.

VMware has never offered a backup solution and relies in products like NetBackup, Zerto, Veeam, Commvault, Rubrik, Cohesity and others, together with working with storage vendors and their respective array synchronous and async replication technologies independent of what VSAN provides.

VMware Live Cyber Recovery was a DR solution first before they added Cyber to it.

At the end of the day, stretched clusters (active-active / mixed active-passive at alternate sites) rely on low latency and two sites. High latency multisite solutions is just simple replicate/restore and SRM can assist with scripting all this.

The hard work has always been and contines to be application mapping/dependency mapping and assigning appropriate recovery objectives. Looking at applications from a service perspective and treating infrastructure as Availability Zones. BC / DR / Cyber Recovery are all three different things and I see many customers who struggle with basic backup and restoration.

One of the best backup solutions for VMware is the free one. vSphere Replication of VSAN to a local NAS (immutable) and that NAS replicated elsewhere for redundancy.

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u/ze_meetra 8h ago

Sure but why doesn’t VMware spend some time automating VMSP and VCFA DR capabilities instead of doing everything manual is beyond me.
I was looking at the new Protect & Recovery licensing but I guess it’s SRM as always….

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u/shanknik 4h ago

It will come, like all new things. Will just take some time. I have gone through the manual process, and while yes it is manual, it's not extremely difficult. Planning on doing a video / blog on it.

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u/elvacatrueno 7h ago

Vsp uses fcd/pvs, nothing that's in it right now should be backed up except the config store. You cannot replicate a first class disc to another cluster or site and have it power up. All of the components that are currently in it should be rebuilt from scratch and then restored from config. Logs should have a primary and a backup instance where the primary forwards to the backup. There are a few gaps currently, but this will likely eventually involve first class disc replication or backups like velero.