VM Disaster Recovery

The goal of the disaster recovery process is returning your virtual infrastructure to a fully operational state with minimal interruptions. Having a disaster recovery solution in place is crucial because system downtime or data loss can translate into unhappy customers, lost revenue, and reduced productivity of your business. Before any sort of interruption occurs, you should safeguard your infrastructure by deploying a data protection solution that can efficiently protect and recover your virtual environment.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides disaster recovery features that can help you protect your Hyper-V or VMware VMs and dramatically reduce recovery times. NAKIVO Backup & Replication enables you to establish a near-instant disaster recovery process with VM replication.

VM Replication

VM replication can drastically reduce the costs and time needed for disaster recovery. VM replication creates and maintains identical copies (“replicas”) of source VMs on a target server. Recovering from a disaster becomes as simple as powering on your VM replicas.

With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can add individual VMware or Hyper-V VMs as well as containers (resource pools, folders, hosts, or clusters) to a replication job, thus ensuring that all your important VMs are always replicated. In addition, you can create up to 30 recovery points per VM replica. If a VM was damaged and then replicated, you can still revert the VM replica back to a previous, intact state. For more information, see VM Replication.

VM Failover and Failback

VM failover is the process of moving your workloads from a production site to a disaster recovery site. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, resuming business operations is as simple as powering on VM replicas to take over the role of their source VMs.

Once the disaster has been resolved and your virtual infrastructure is restored, you may want your workloads returned back to your primary site. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication’s failback process, you can replicate your VMs back to the production site and resume normal business operations at your primary site.

RTO & RPO

NAKIVO Backup & Replication can help you achieve shorter Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) for your virtual infrastructure. An RPO is a measure of how much data (in terms of the time elapsed) you can afford to lose when restoring your VMs case of a disaster. A short RPO means that you must recover data from a recent point – close to the point of system failure. Similarly, an RTO is the maximum amount of time that you can afford to take for restoring your virtual infrastructure. Shorter RTOs (and thus minimized downtime) can be achieved with continuous data protection.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides a number of features designed to help you achieve tight RPOs and RTOs:

• Forever-incremental jobs. After the initial VM replication, all subsequent jobs run in NAKIVO Backup & Replication are forever-incremental and do not require periodic full runs. This makes replication processes much faster.
• VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) and Hyper-V Resilient Change Tracking (RCT). With CBT and RCT technologies, NAKIVO Backup & Replication can quickly identify data blocks that have changed since the last job run, which significantly increases job speed.
• Network Acceleration. The product’s built-in Network Acceleration feature makes the replication of VMware and Hyper-V VMs over WAN up to 2X faster. NAKIVO Backup & Replication uses compression and traffic reduction techniques to speed up data transfer.
• Direct SAN Access. With Direct SAN Access mode, you can speed up VM replication jobs while decreasing the load on your production network.

How Does VM Disaster Recovery Work?

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides disaster recovery via VM replication. Once your VMs have been replicated, you can coordinate automated failover to your disaster recovery site by simply creating and running a Recovery Job in NAKIVO Backup & Replication. During failover, NAKIVO Backup & Replication reverts VM replicas to the necessary recovery points (VM snapshots) and then powers on the VM replicas. For failback, just replicate the VM replicas back to the production site and power them on.