DR Strategies for Hyperconverged Architectures

Hyperconverged infrastructure products promise to bring the best of virtualization to an easy-to-manage platform. The question is do they help solve one of the greatest challenges modern IT environment have: DR? The answer may come down to what hypervisor they use.

VMware and Hyper-V do have built-in capabilities. But they often come with limitations that can limit your configuration options. Some users of VMware Site Recover Manager (SRM), for example, have chosen to use array-based replication to ensure that recovery data is available at the DR site. Unfortunately, they run into requirements that require the same exact hardware to be in both places, and many customers found these limitations kept them from implementing these tools. There is also the problem that most hyperconverged architectures don’t support external arrays.

This is why VMware and Microsoft responded with software-based replication. vCenter SRM now includes VMware replication and Hyper-V Replica uses software replication as well. However, these products come with their own limitations, such as the SRM requirement to have exactly the same CPU and bios settings if memory-state snapshots are to be used for DR. There are also limitations in these products that limit how far back in time they can go. vCenter SRM can only recover back to the last vSphere snapshot, and Hyper-V replica can only recover back to a recovery point made in the last 24 hours.

Many folks felt that something was better than nothing and accepted the limitations of the built-in DR offerings of VMware and Microsoft. Others sought to get past these limitations by implementing 3rd party DR offerings, many of which are quite good. The question is: if the hypervisor itself had a strong enough DR story, would there be a need for 3rd party options? Probably not. Another question is whether the implementation of a 3rd party DR tool goes against the core concept of simplicity that is behind hyperconverged architectures.

These are the questions that we plan to ask and answer in our on demand webinar “DR Strategies for Hyperconverged Architectures”.

We discuss the following:

• The limitations of VMware/HyperV DR
• The challenges with adding a third party DR product
• The Advantages of Alternative hypervisors

Watch On Demand

About wcurtispreston

W. Curtis Preston (aka Mr. Backup) is an expert in backup & recovery systems; a space he has been working in since 1993. He has written three books on the subject, Backup & Recovery, Using SANs and NAS, and Unix Backup & Recovery. Mr. Preston is a writer and has spoken at hundreds of seminars and conferences around the world. Preston’s mission is to arm today’s IT managers with truly unbiased information about today’s storage industry and its products.