Hi again everyone!
It’s time for another installment of my blog series about NetApp® BlueXP™ disaster recovery. In my previous posts (here and here), I introduced you to the BlueXP disaster recovery (BlueXP DR) service and described how it protects your on-premises NetApp ONTAP® hosted VMware SDDC infrastructure using either an AWS VMware Cloud hosted SDDC using FSx for NetApp ONTAP, or to a second on-premises SDDC cluster using ONTAP datastores. Today, I want to let everyone know about the availability of a really cool resource that might help you along your DR solution journey…the new BlueXP disaster recovery Lab on Demand!
For those not familiar with our Lab on Demand (LOD) offering, it is really a hidden gem. NetApp is one of the only companies I know that offers this capability. NetApp offers over 100 different LODs that partners, existing customers with a support agreement, and – to a more limited list of LODs – potential customers can get access to and use to take a “Test Drive” of many of our products and services before committing to purchase. This is great for services like BlueXP DR. Without an LOD, you would need to create a BlueXP account for your company, install the required components into your infrastructure and then add all of the virtualized infrastructure and storage components to BlueXP…something that takes a lot of commitment just to run tests. Now, you can simply use the new BlueXP DR LOD and start experiencing the benefits with much less overhead.
When you request this LOD, you get a ready-made infrastructure consisting of two ONTAP clusters, two VMware vCenter clusters – each running a Linux VM – along with a temporary BlueXP account. The LOD lab guide walks you through activating the temporary disaster recovery license and adding all of the LOD vCenter components, setting up resource groups and replication plans, and performing a failover and failback of the protected VMs…just like you would do in a production environment. While we offer a free, unlimited capacity 90-day free trial of BlueXP DR service, you must have an existing VMware infrastructure running on ONTAP hosted NFS datastores before you can use the free trial. This LOD offers a less intrusive first step in your DR solution journey.
Now that we have this LOD, the evaluation process could be:
- Use the LOD to learn more about the service and how easy it is to configure and use.
- Sign up for the 90-day free, unlimited capacity trial and integrate your own test or production environment to the service. This allows you to use your real-world requirements within the service to see how well it fits.
- Subscribe to BlueXP DR when you are ready to move BlueXP DR into your production environment.
Depending on whether you are a partner, or existing, you can request the disaster recovery LOD for up to 7 calendar days, so creating a comprehensive test and evaluation plan is crucial to getting the full advantage of the lab.
If you want to learn more, check out the following resources:
If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments below or contact your NetApp sales representative. We are here to help in any way we can.
BlueXP DR Blog Index:
- Disaster recovery as a service for your hybrid-cloud VMware infrastructure using BlueXP
- BlueXP disaster recovery: How it protects your VMware virtual machines
