We are truly excited today to announce an extension of ReliableDR called “VMware Certified Application Recovery” or VCAR. VCAR is in effect a custom version of ReliableDR that is specifically tailored for the Unitrends Enterprise Backup (UEB) and Recovery Series (RS) appliances to provide recovery assurance of backup data. For those of you who may not be familiar with the ReliableDR product, a short introduction is in order.
First, the basics: Backups are about trust.
If you are an IT administrator, you are very comfortable with technology. We at Unitrends are honored that you have chosen our product out of all of the available options on the market to be the data recovery solution for your business. In short, you trust us to recover your business’ data.
But for the CIO, is trust enough?
As any good CIO will attest, a Disaster Recovery plan must entail more than just recovering data on servers; it is about knowing that you can recover your applications with minimal data loss (Recovery Point Objective) and knowing that the applications are able to be online, servicing clients within a specified time (Recovery Time Objective). Is it possible to know what your Disaster Recovery RPO and RTOs are at any point in time?
“Trust, but verify”, a Russian Proverb
VCAR is a product that integrates with the newly released Recovery-Series version 7.4 VMWare Instant Recovery (VMIR) feature. With this feature, a VMWare backup can be spun up directly on a VMware host, without first having to do a restore. VCAR can directly control this process as follows: First, specify a virtual machines in the VCAR interface. Next, VCAR will query the Recovery Series or UEB appliance to identify the most recent backup of this VM, initiate a VMIR session on the backup, spin up the VM on an isolated network, and measure the time it takes for the application to come online. Application functionality can be verified with either bundled or custom application specific test modules. At this point, VCAR records the actual, measured RPO and RTO of your application through the entire recovery process! Any changes made to the VM as part of the recovery tests are discarded along with the VMIR session, so with each backup, you are measuring an actual end-to-end recovery time.
After VCAR compares these actual recovery times against your specified RPO and RTO goals, it will generate a report that can be mailed to the CIO each day, verifying that the Disaster Recovery goals are met, or alerting your when they are not met (see screenshot below).
Finally, note that the certification status of the backup is also written back to the Recovery Series or UEB appliance, so that you can view it in the backup reports. This validation/certification can be done for either local backups, or replicated backups (see screenshot below).
“If this had been an actual emergency”
In the event of an actual disaster, VCAR can start a failover, which will bring up the Virtual Machines on the VMware host, and initiate a storage vmotion to bring the data to the production datastore of your choosing.
For more information…
Be sure to check out our youtube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2g8Qt-ueKok
A free trial download of VMware Certified Application recovery (VCAR) version 3.4 is available here.
Authors:
Alberto Gonzalez is the Director of ReliableDR product development, based in Madrid Spain.
Keith Boland, PhD is the Director of Technology at Unitrends, based in Columbia, SC.