How BlueXP disaster recovery integrates with the VMware virtual infrastructure

ansley_tj · ‎2024-07-29

Hi again everyone!

In my previous posts (see links at bottom of page), I introduced you to the NetApp® BlueXP® disaster recovery (BlueXP DR) service and described how it protects your on-premises ONTAP® hosted VMware VMs to either an AWS VMware Cloud-hosted SDDC using FSx for NetApp ONTAP or to a second on-premises vSphere cluster using ONTAP-hosted datastores. Today, I want to discuss how BlueXP DR integrates with VMware to allow us to do what we do…orchestrate the replication and failover of VMware datastores and VMs.

One of the great benefits of BlueXP DR is that you are managing the replication of the workload…in our initial use case, VMware VMs…rather than having to manage the storage and application failover separately. I think it is pretty obvious that BlueXP DR would – and should – easily manage ONTAP storage and leverage all of the greatness that ONTAP provides, such as storage-efficient data replication using SnapMirror® technology, but what may not be as obvious is that VMware makes it relatively easy for us to integrate and orchestrate the VMware environment as well. BlueXP DR uses the VMware-published application programming interface (API) to perform all the VMware processes needed to get the VMs back up and running on the DR site.

To do this, we need access to each VMware vCenter cluster, and we gain this through a VMware user account. This account must have a minimum set of VMware privileges to do what we need to do successfully. Of course, you could provide BlueXP DR with the full administrator user account and we would have all of the privileges we need…but we would also have the privileges to do a lot more than required…and many probably don’t want to give us that full access – not that we would ever go beyond the privileges we do need – to your vCenters…and I would not blame you if you don’t want to provide us with that master administrator login 😃.

So, we recommend creating a dedicated account for BlueXP DR…something like BlueXPDR-Manager@vsphere.local…and giving that account the minimum set of privileges we require. So, what privileges do we need?

Here is the full list:

Type	Privilege Name
Datastore	Datastore.Configure datastore
Datastore	Datastore.Remove datastore
Virtual Machine	Virtual machine.Configuration.Change Settings
	Virtual machine.Configuration.Modify device settings
	Virtual machine.Configuration.Reload from path
	Virtual machine.Configuration.Rename
	Virtual machine.Configuration.Reset guest information
	Virtual machine.Configuration.Change Memory
	Virtual machine.Configuration.Change CPU count
Virtual Machine Guest	Virtual machine.Guest Operations.Guest Operation Modifications
Virtual Machine Interaction	Virtual machine.Interaction.Power Off
	Virtual machine.Interaction.Power On
	Virtual machine.Interaction.VMware Tools install
Virtual Machine Inventory	Virtual machine.Inventory.Create new
	Virtual machine.Inventory.Register
	Virtual machine.Inventory.Unregister
Virtual Machine State	Virtual machine.Snapshot management.Create snapshot
	Virtual machine.Snapshot management.Remove Snapshot
	Virtual machine.Snapshot management.Revert to snapshot

We take care of the rest once you add all your vCenters clusters to BlueXP DR. As a BlueXP DR user, you create DR plans by selecting the VMs you want to protect. BlueXP DR will query vCenter as to where these VMs reside, and from there, we can trace this back to the ONTAP volumes we need to replicate. When you need to perform a failover, we can activate those ONTAP DR volumes and instruct the DR vCenter clusters to mount those ONTAP volumes as datastores, perform any VM reconfiguration that is defined in the replication plan, and restart those VMs as quickly as possible.

For the super technical readers, here is what this looks like in a high-level flow chart:

Everything in the grey box is what BlueXP DR instructs vCenter to do on our behalf via the VMware API. As you can see, we can potentially perform many different pre- and post-VM start operations. In future blog entries, I will address many of these steps to help you understand how BlueXP works and how valuable it can be as your go-to DR solution for VMware infrastructure.

If you want to learn more, check out the following resources:

Please let me know in the comments below or contact your NetApp sales representative if you have any questions. We are here to help in any way we can.

BlueXP DR Blog Index:

How BlueXP integrates with VMware (This Blog)