HotLink DR Express

HotLink DR Express 3.0- DR on AWS -

21/02/2014

HotLink DR Express

RTO: Recovery Time Objective

‘How long will it take for the system to be operational after a disaster?’

- RTO is an agreed target of the maximum time taken to restore a service – e.g. 8 hours

HotLink DR Express

RPO: Recovery Point Objective

‘How much data will I lose?’

-RPO is an agreed target of the maximum amount of data loss acceptable after a disaster

-Typically specified in hours since the last good backup

Traditional DR ModelsCold Standby – Offsite backup tape storage. Maybe dedicated replacement hardware/facilities in storage. [RTO=weeks, RPO=24hrs]. Cheap(ish)

Warm Standby @ Secondary Datacenter – Dedicated Datacenter, periodic replication of some data. [RTO=hours/days, RPO=15mins-24hrs] Expensive but essential for many.

Hot Standby @ Secondary Datacenter – Expensive real-time replication of data, automated failover. [RTO<5 mins, RPO=sub-second].Too expensive for most.

DR

-RTO in minutes/VM

-RPO Configurable for each individual VM - (typically 15 mins to 2 hours)

+ Backup

- Consolidate older Recovery Points to once per day (configurable). Store up to 500 Snapshots/VM

HotLink DR Express

HotLink DR Express – AWS Components

Datacenter Equivalent Amazon AWS Equivalent

vSphere VM - Virtual Machine EC2 - Elastic Cloud Computing

- 1vCPU, 2GB RAM - m1.small

- 1vCPU, 4GB RAM - m1.medium

- 2vCPU, 8GB RAM - m1.large

- 4vCPU, 16GB RAM - m1.xlarge

Primary Storage (SAN) EBS - Elastic Block Storage

Near-Line Storage (disk-based backup data, archives)

S3 - Simple Storage Service

Internet Firewall ‘Security Groups’

Datacenter LAN VPC – Virtual Private Cloud

WAN ‘Hardware VPN’ (+VPC)

(rough guide for VMWare admins unfamiliar with AWS – AWS capabilities differ from VMWare and can’t be accurately compared)

Hyp erviso r Host (ESX Server)

Virtual M ach ines

Primary (SA N) Storage

Near-Lin e (Backu p) Storage

Network Sw itches

Netwo rk Firewall

Intern et Co nnectio n


Virtua l M ach in es



Netwo rk Sw itches

Netwo rk Firewall


Replication

Replication

Po wer and Coo lin g

Rack/Floo rs pace


Rack/Floo rs pace

DC M an agem ent DC M an agem ent

Production Datacenter

DR Datacenter

Traditional Warm/Hot Standby VMWare DR



Virtual M ach ines



Network Sw itches

Netwo rk Firewall


AW S Cloud - BAU

Near-Lin e (S3) Storage

Network Firewall (VPN )

Replication


Rack/Floo rs pace

DC M an agem ent

HotLink DR – Business as Usual state (no disasters)



Virtual M ach ines



Network Sw itches

Netwo rk Firewall


AW S Cloud - BAU


Network Firewall (VPN )

Replication


Rack/Floo rs pace

DC M an agem ent

HotLink DR – Business as Usual state (no disasters)

AW S Cloud –DR Invoked

Virtual M ach in es (EC2)

Primary (EBS) Storage


Netwo rk Firewall (VPN )

How it works – Backups & ReplicationHotLink DR Express automatically: -Clones a VM

-Converts VM from VMWare to AWS EC2 format

-Uploads VM to AWS S3 Storage

-Takes periodic snapshots and uploads changes to AWS S3

HotLink DR Express

How it works – RecoveryHotLink DR Express automatically: -Moves selected VM Snapshot from S3 to EBS

-Creates EC2 VM

-Powers on EC2 VM with attached storage

-Connects EC2 VM to VPC network and assigns DHCP IP Address

HotLink DR Express

What it looks like – Admin consolesProtection, replication and recovery all performed through familiar vCenter console

vCenter plugin shows protection options – can enable/disable protection and set/modify RPO and consolidation of snapshots easily per VM

HotLink DR Express

HotLink DR Express

What it looks like – Admin consoles2 additional Datacenters shown in vCenter:-‘DR Express’ – shows ‘shadow’ versions of production VMs. Select a snapshot from here to recover (using standard snapshot manager menu)-‘EC2’ – shows recovered VMs, running on EC2

HotLink DR Express

Recovery Features-Can recover single VM to multiple points in time

-Recovered VMs include their snap timestamp in their VM name

-All recovered VMs auto-configured for DHCP when started on EC2 – can modify IP settings after boot.

-Can recover VMs individually, or in batches

-Recover to EC2, or back to your datacenter (after DR event is over)

HotLink DR Express Whole Datacenter failover

Requires additional planning, additional components:- Secondary vCenter installation running on AWS

AWS VPC – Example Configuration

Component Limit Comments

VPCs per region 5

Subnets per VPC 200Internet gateways per region 5 One per VPCVirtual private gateways per region 5 One per VPCCustomer gateways per region 50

VPN connections per region

50 Ten per virtual private gateway

Route tables per VPC 10 Including the main route table

Entries per route table 20

Elastic IP addresses per region for each AWS account 5 Amazon EC2 has a separate limit for its Elastic IP addresses per region for each AWS account

Security groups per VPC 100

Rules per security group 50

Security groups you can assign to an instance in a VPC 5

Network ACLs per VPC 50

Rules per network ACL 20

BGP Advertised Routes per VPN Connection 100

AWS VPC Limitations (acceptable)

HotLink DR Express

Supported PlatformsHost Platforms- Amazon EC2 (all regions worldwide)Guest Operating Systems- Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 (RHEL 5.4, 5.6, 5.8)- Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6 (RHEL 6.0, 6.2)- CentOS versions of these Red Hat releases- Windows Server 2008 R2 and R2 SP1- Windows Server 2012VMware vCenter- VMware vCenter 5.1

Current Supported Version = vSphere 5.1[Support for vSphere v5.5 expected very soon (Q1 ‘14)]

Initial replication (seed) of VMs is dependent on Internet Bandwidth at primary datacentre, could take a while to protect large environments-Can use Amazon Connect (avail through some ISPs)

HotLink DR Express

Cheap – only pay for DR resources when you need them

Reliable AWS infrastructure (including S3 Storage)

Familiar vCenter integration

Unique technology to translate VMWare and EC2 Images

Affordable initial investment – start small (30VMs) and scale up as required.

HotLink DR Express

Unique Capability use case – DR protection in a hurry

“Bob is the CIO of a small/medium enterprise (100 production servers). Regulatory requirements require a Business Continuity Plan. He has 2 weeks to install configure and test an IT Disaster Recovery plan before a compliance Audit”

- Deploy infrastructure in as little as a single day (depending on networking requirements)

-Initial Seeding performed in batches, can be fully protected within days (bandwidth dependent)

- This can be reduced with Amazon Web Connect-Can demonstrate recovery capabilities at any time without impacting production servers

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HotLink DR Express