Cloudist Disaster Recovery - Service Description

Terms and abbreviations

Terms or abbreviations

Definition

Terms or abbreviations

Definition

VCDA

VMware Cloud Director Availability

VMware Cloud Director Availability is a solution built to offer onboarding, migration, and disaster recovery services “to” or “between” multi-tenant VMware clouds.

Region

A region is a geographical area where Cloudist Solutions provides availability zones. Cloudist Solutions regions meet the highest levels of security, compliance, and data protection

Site

A site represents a VMware environment in the Cloudist Disaster Recovery console. Sites can be on-prem at a customer or partner location, or at Cloudist Solutions. Sites are the entry points where migrations, replications and failovers are moved to, from and between.

SLA Profiles

SLA profiles can be assigned to multiple VMware Cloud Director organizations to control the following SLA settings of the replications:

  • The target recovery point objective (RPO)

  • The retention policy for the point-in-time instances

  • Whether quiescing is enabled

  • Whether compression is enabled

  • Timeslot to delay the initial synchronization

RPO

The target RPO is the longest tolerable timeframe of data loss. For example, with one hour RPO the recovered virtual machine can have no more than one hour of data lost.

Example:

Point in time instances

Point in time instances preserve multiple distinct replication instances to which the virtual machines can be recovered. These are effectively restore points that can be configured by:

  • Preserve (instances): 1 - 24

  • Spread evenly over : 1 day - 1 year

Example:

vDC

Virtual Datacenter

Service name

Cloudist Disaster Recovery

Cloudist Disaster Recovery service is built on VMware Cloud Director Availability and integrated with VMware Cloud Director.

The Cloudist Disaster Recovery service provides migration, and disaster recovery services to or between Cloudist VDC and on-premise sites. Customers can self-service configure asynchronous replications, failover, and workload migrations for vApps or virtual machines in the following scenarios:

  • From an on-premises vCenter Server site to a Cloudist VDC site

  • From a Cloudist VDC site to an on-premises vCenter Server site

  • From one Cloudist VDC site to another Cloudist VDC site

Service features and functions

Workload Migration

Description

A Workload Migration is the movement of a virtual machine or vapp from an on-premise vSphere environment to the Cloudist VDC service. Customer can pair their on-premise site with a Cloudist Disaster Recovery region. Once sites are paired, customers can create, modify and remove migrations between their site and a Cloudist VDC organisation.

When performing a planned migration, it is assumed that both the source and target sites are healthy. Using this option will shut down the VMs at the source site as the first step in the process.  When using the Migrate operation you will still have the option to configure reverse protection once the Migrate operation completes.

Features

Customer can

  • Create, modify and delete an on-prem site and site pairing

  • Create, modify and delete a workload migration

  • Migrate workloads to destination sites

  • Migrate workloads from destination sites

  • Manage a site from both the on-prem and cloud site.

On-premise DR to Cloud

Description

On-premise DR to Cloud is the ongoing protection of a virtual machine or vapp from an on-premise vSphere environment to the Cloudist Disaster Recovery service. Protections are as continuous replications defined by 'RPO' and 'Point in time instances'

Features

Customer can:

  • Create, modify and delete an on-prem site and site pairing

  • Manage a site from both the on-prem and cloud Cloudist Disaster Recovery user interface (VMware Cloud Director plugin or publicly via browser).

  • Create, modify and delete a workload protection

  • Failover workloads to-destination sites

  • Failback workloads from-destination sites

  • Reverse Failover workloads to synchronize data between source and destination sites

  • Reverse Failback workloads to synchronize data between source and destination sites

  • Test replication tasks and cleanup test data

Cloud to Cloud DR

Description

Cloud to Cloud DR is the ongoing protection of a virtual machine or vapp from one Cloudist VDC environment to another Cloudist VDC environment. Protections are continuous replications defined by 'RPO' and 'Point in time instances' from one site to another.

Features

Customer can:

  • Manage a site from both Cloudist Disaster Recovery regions' user interface (Vmware Cloud Director plugin or publicly via browser).

  • Create, modify and delete a workload protection

  • Failover workloads to-destination sites

  • Failback workloads from-destination sites

  • Reverse Failover workloads to synchronize data between source and destination sites

  • Reverse Failback workloads to synchronize data between source and destination sites

  • Test replication tasks and cleanup test data

 

Service prerequisites

  • Customer needs to have account created in Cloudist Portal.

  • Customer needs to have a VDC created in one or more Cloudist regions.

  • Customer needs to have an Internet connection to be able to access and manage resources.

  • Customer needs to have read, accepted and adhere to Terms & Conditions for service Cloudist VDC

Service dependencies

  • ISP network connection services (if customer is using shared Internet connection provided by Cloudist VDC, optional)

    • Please note that service bandwidth is dependent on end to end connectivity and therefore throughput may vary depending intermediary infrastructure

  • Minimum VMware vCenter Server v6.5 U3 for On-Premise DR to Cloud only

  • Cloud infrastructure hardware and software, as described in Virtual datacenter above

  • Data center services

Service delivery

Management interface delivery

Cloudist Disaster Recovery management interface is delivered to customer over secure Internet protocols through the following URLs and VMware Cloud Director tenant interface. These interfaces enables customer to get an overview of service usage and manage workflows.

Operational service delivery

Cloudist Disaster Recovery operational service delivery is limited to delivering the replication capabilities of workloads. This delivery does not include the availability of any operating system, software or other application running in any the virtual machine, virtual firewalls/routers.

Maintenance windows

Maintenance windows are scheduled the third weekend (Saturday 06.00 CET until Sunday 22.00 CET) every quarter. Downtime during maintenance windows is not included when calculating service availability.

Maintenance window notification will be sent to customer disruption email address no later than the last Wednesday prior to the maintenance window.

Dependency on VMware Cloud Director

When Cloud Director (Cloudist VDC) is offline it will only impact the management of replications in VMware Cloud Directory Availability (Cloudist Disaster Recovery), but not the ongoing synchronizing or scheduling of existing replications.

Once a replication has finished its initial configuration, while it is being protected the replication is no longer dependent on Cloud Director being available. The only thing that will fail while Cloud Director is offline will be vCDs own awareness of the change in size of the placeholder independent disk. This update on the independent disk size is not a blocker for any other replication tasks from completing, and once Cloud Director is online again the next synchronization will result in the independent disk size being updated correctly.

Regarding the impact on management: as VMware Cloud Directory Availability needs to authenticate with VMware Cloud Director before configuring new replications, making changes to existing ones, or performing failover tasks, it would not be possible to perform these from the site vCD is offline.

For example:

  • SEN1-AZ1-VDC is down

  • Management interface for SEN1-AZ1-CloudistAvailability is unavailable

  • Management interface for SEC1-AZ1-CloudistAvailability is available

    • Fail overs could be performed from here in the event of a major outage

Customer responsibilities

It is the customers responsibility to ensure replications are configured, operational and routinely tested with the ‘Test Failover’ feature

Knowledge base

Service owner

John Hicks

Business owner

Jasenko Masic

Service level agreement

See Service level agreement for details

Service support

Service desk is reached https://portal.cloudist.se or support@cloudist.se