The days of managing a remote DR hot site are over!!! Last week at Amazon reInvent, VMware announced General Availability of DR as a Service for VMware Cloud on AWS. This service leverages a very mature and widely used solution from VMWare called SRM or Site Recovery Manager. In this post I will walk you through the new service as well as answer some common questions. You will also be excited to hear that SRM got some much needed love and facelift in the form of new HTML 5 client and simplified workflows!
Service Overview:
Technical Architecture:
Deploying the Service is easy, simply login to the VMware Cloud on AWS portal and go to Add Ons and click Activate!
Once Activated on the VMware Cloud on AWS side, simply download the appliance to install locally.
Now login to the fresh new HTML 5 client and setup your Protection Groups and recovery plans!
Common Questions and answers:
- Does this service require me to provision an SDDC in VMware Cloud on AWS? Yes!
- Is there additional cost to use this add-on service on top of VMware Cloud on AWS? Yes see pricing here.
- Do I need to have a license for VMware Site Recovery Manager on prem to use this new service. No, pricing includes the on prem SRM components.
- So the hosts are provisioned but the VM’s are powered off, how can I utalize this idle capacity? Like many customers do today, you could also run Dev/Test workloads in the VMware Cloud on AWS cluster, put them in a low priority Resource pool and in the event of a disaster you can prioritize your more business critical workloads.