Disaster Recovery User's Guide

The Disaster Recovery Service 1
vCloud Air – Disaster Recovery is a Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS) offering intended to protect virtual
workloads managed by VMware vSphere that are either deployed in a private cloud or data center.
To implement and consume vCloud Air – Disaster Recovery, you require the following VMware products
and services:
n
vSphere Replication
vSphere Replication is a feature of the VMware vSphere platform. vSphere Replication copies a virtual
machine to another location, within or between clusters, and makes that copy available for recovery
through the VMware vSphere Web Client or through the orchestration of a full disaster recovery
product such as VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager.
n
vCloud Air
vCloud Air is a secure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud owned and operated by VMware, built
on the trusted foundation of vSphere. The service supports existing workloads and new application
development, giving IT administrators and architects a common platform for seamlessly extending
existing data centers to the cloud by leveraging the same tools and processes they use today.
n
vCloud Connector
vCloud Connector provides support for initial data seeding and failback of workflows to your source
site by using vCloud Connector Offline Data Transfer (ODT).
NOTE If you are using vCloud Air – Disaster Recovery with access to failback capabilities via vSphere
Replication, you can do reverse replication from a vCloud Air data center to your on-premises data
center using the vSphere Replication Web Client. If not, you will need to copy virtual machines from
vCloud Air to your on-premises data center using vCloud Connector ODT.
Although Disaster Recovery is based on the vCloud Air Subscription model, it is delivered on the
Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand platform, which allows you to seamlessly scale your protection capacity
to meet variable demands.
To be able to use all the features of Disaster Recovery, it is recommended that you upgrade to vSphere
version 6.0. If you are running vSphere version 5.5 or earlier in your data center, you can still use
Disaster Recovery to provide the failover capability for your virtual machines. However, you may not be
able to use the latest Disaster Recovery features.
This user guide addresses configuration, setup, and management aspects of vCloud Air in support of the
Disaster Recovery service.
For information about vSphere Replication, see the vSphere Replication 6.0 Disaster Recovery to Cloud
documentation.
VMware, Inc.
7