Intro
As we get this year kicked off, let's revisit some of the reasons so many customers choose NetApp and VMware. We are ramping up loads of new content for the new year, but first, this blog series highlights the advantages of hybrid multicloud environments powered by NetApp and VMware. Throughout the series, we will explore these benefits with supporting resources and technical examples to help you better understand each topic.
This blog focuses on the data protection benefits gained when leveraging NetApp and VMware. Within this blog, we will discuss the various options for protecting your VM and application data depending on the RTO and RPO of your organization. Additionally, we will review a step-by-step walkthrough of using NetApp BlueXP disaster recovery to restore VMs to the public cloud as an example.
The Setup
Ensuring enterprise-grade data protection and implementing a robust disaster recovery strategy pose significant challenges for virtual infrastructure administrators, cloud architects, and operations teams. Terms such as recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) hold immense importance for businesses. Customers require clarity on which workloads and VMs are safeguarded, the time required for recovery, and equally vital, the associated costs. At the heart of this lies the data, as without application data, the VMs become meaningless.
Data Protection
For over two decades, NetApp has partnered with VMware to provide trusted storage solutions for virtual infrastructure. With this long-standing relationship, our data protection offerings are built to work seamlessly with VMware to support on-premises and cloud-native workloads. It is no surprise that many customers choose NetApp when architecting virtualization solutions, especially when data protection is vital.
With NetApp there is resiliency within the hardware, through plugins and product integrations, and of course within ONTAP itself. Customers benefit by offloading VM backups and restores to NetApp while helping to deliver zero RPO and lower RTO data replication.
With NetApp, there are many ways to protect your workloads depending on the business objective. They can be organized as follows:
- Cloud disaster recovery - NetApp enables you to easily tier, replicate, and clone your data using our cloud-based disaster recovery solutions. By leveraging disaster recovery to the cloud, you can effectively protect your workloads and VMs against outages and data corruption events. Tools such as NetApp BlueXP disaster recovery and Disaster Recovery Orchestrator aid in the protection of VMs depending on the desired business outcome and service level required.
Note: BlueXP Disaster Recovery for VMware is currently in preview.
- Backup and restore - NetApp backup and recovery solutions protect your data across the hybrid multicloud. Our solutions enable effortless retrieval and recovery, ensuring business continuity and maximum uptime. With NetApp SnapCenter, you can effectively coordinate and manage data protection across applications, databases and file systems. It allows offloading tasks to application owners while maintaining oversight and control over storage system activity. The SnapCenter Plug-in for VMware vSphere protects VMs, datastores and VMDKs backup and restore operations that are fast, space-efficient, crash-consistent, and VM-consistent.
- Governance management - NetApp compliance and governance solutions help control access, disclosure and modification of your data while classifying and categorizing data as well. NetApp solutions such as Blue XP classification and Cloud Insights help with data analysis, data retention, storage optimization and monitoring helping you identify threats and enact automated rules and policies to protect your workloads from cyber threats while maintaining compliance.
- Business continuity - Maintaining critical business functions during a disaster has been a core pillar of ONTAP since the early 2000s with NetApp SnapMirror software. Through years of continuous innovation, SnapMirror protection relationships can be configured based on your use case needs with a variety of capabilities, performance levels and protection copies. In short, SnapMirror can be configured for asynchronous, synchronous, or active sync protection relationships helping you to achieve the RPO and RTO needs of your business.
Some helpful data protection resources are as follows:
- NetApp BlueXP disaster recovery for VMware and Disaster Recovery Orchestrator
- NetApp SnapCenter Software and NetApp SnapCenter Plug-in for VMware vSphere
- NetApp BlueXP classification and NetApp Cloud Insights
- NetApp SnapMirror
The Example: VM Protection with NetApp BlueXP disaster recovery
In this example, we will develop a replication plan for an on-premises VM using NetApp BlueXP disaster recovery, demonstrating data protection with NetApp and VMware.
Note: In the example below, we are demonstrating protecting an on-premises VM to VMware Cloud on AWS which is one of several use cases available.
1. Get started by confirming the available sites (your on-premises vCenter and your SDDC in VMC) by navigating to Sites after selecting Disaster recovery (Beta) from the Protection dropdown of BlueXP.
2. Launch the Add resource group wizard by selecting the Resource groups tab and +Add group.
3. Add the VMs to be protected as part of the new resource group.
4. Launch the Add replication plan wizard by selecting the Replication plans tab and +Add plan.
5. Create a replication plan that includes:
- The source and target clusters
- The source and target virtual networks
- Any necessary modification to VM CPU and RAM requirements
- Source and target datastores
- Whether the plan is a migration or replication
6. Now that the Resource Group and Replication plans are in place you can:
- View the plan details
- Run compliance checks
- Test Failover and more...
7. Select Test failover to run through a failover scenario.
This BlueXP disaster recovery protection exercise demonstrated how easily a VM can be protected to the public cloud. In the walkthrough, BlueXP disaster recovery did the following:
- SnapMirror relationship update
- Clone and mount of datastore volume in VMC
- Register and power on of protected VMs
Similar relevant steps can be used for a variety of use cases.
The Wrap-up
This blog covered how data protection benefits can be achieved when using VMware and NetApp. The various NetApp solutions for data protection can be utilized to protect your workloads depending on business needs.
For more information see the NetApp solutions documentation for VMware:
