Let’s face it—sometimes performing a standard VM backup just isn’t enough. If your production site is down, whether due to disaster or human error, it is paramount that you quickly resume business processes, lest you face the risk of losing money and customers. For this reason, NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers a comprehensive disaster recovery solution called Site Recovery.
With Site Recovery, you can create recovery workflows and perform scheduled non-disruptive disaster recovery testing. Each workflow combines certain actions and conditions that can be executed in a single click, edited, and tested at will.
Let’s create a simple workflow using Site Recovery to demonstrate how quickly you can restore your production environment after a disaster:
Steps (11 total)
Create a site recovery workflow
From the main UI of NAKIVO Backup & Replication, click Create and select Site recovery job.
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2. Start adding actions to the workflow
On the left, you can see the full list of actions available to you. For the purposes of this demonstration, let’s say you have a VMware environment that you want to recover with this particular workflow. Let’s start by stopping the existing jobs, in order to free up resources and increase the reliability of the site recovery process. Choose Stop jobs from the list.
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3.Choose the jobs to stop
Select the jobs you wish to be stopped from the list on the left. Make sure to note the Action options below. The first option, Run this action in, allows the action to run only in production mode, testing mode, or in both. You can also configure the Waiting behavior of the solution for this action. NAKIVO Backup & Replication can wait for this action to finish, or proceed with the next action in the list immediately. The last option is Error handling. If the set action fails, the solution can be set to either proceed with the Site Recovery workflow or fail the entire job automatically.
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4.Select VMs to fail over
At the next step, you must select the Failover VMware VMs action. This allows you to transfer workloads to your VM replicas at the DR location so as to promptly resume business operations. On the first screen, you can choose the replicas you wish to be used for failover and select the recovery point. Keep in mind that these replicas need to be created beforehand. Once done, configure the Action options and make sure Power off source VMs option is enabled to avoid any errors.
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5.Wait a few minutes
Select the Wait action from the list to give your VMs enough time to boot properly.
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6.Restart the jobs
After a successful failover, you can restart the jobs which were previously stopped. Add Run jobs action and reselect the jobs you want to start again. Click Next to proceed with the workflow configuration.
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7. Enable network mapping
Since your workflow includes the Failover action, the solution will allow you to configure network mapping and re-IP options to further automate the process. Network mapping helps connect VM replicas to the right network after failover, and re-IP assigns appropriate IP addresses to them.
To enable Network Mapping, specify the source and target networks you wish to be used, or choose a rule that has already been created.
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8.Configure Re-IP
As is the case with network mapping, in order to enable Re-IP, you need to specify the old and new IP addresses for your VMs, or choose one of the rules which was created beforehand.
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9. Schedule the workflow testing
Site Recovery workflows can be tested on a schedule. You have a wide variety of options to choose from in terms of scheduling, such as having multiple schedules and using the calendar dashboard. You can also choose to disable scheduling altogether and run tests on demand.
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10.Finish the workflow creation
At the final step of the workflow creation, you can enter a Job name and set the required recovery time objective (RTO) for testing purposes. Click Finish once you’re done.
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11.Run or test your site recovery workflow
Once your site recovery workflow has been created, you can run it either in test or production mode from the main UI of NAKIVO Backup & Replication by clicking Run Job, and choosing the appropriate option. One thing to note is that if you run Site Recovery in production, you will be prompted to choose the Failover type. This can either be a Planned Failover or an Emergency Failover. If you select the former, the solution is going to make one final snapshot before switching workloads to replicas. You should select this option if you still have time to prepare, for example, before an anticipated blackout. Choosing the latter option allows you to switch workloads immediately during failover. Additionally, you can always edit your created site recovery workflow if necessary.
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Conclusion
Site Recovery is a simple and effective disaster recovery functionality integrated into NAKIVO Backup & Replication. With Site Recovery, you can create a workflow of almost any level of complexity, containing a set of actions for any disaster or emergency scenario that suits your needs best.
In this short tutorial we have shown you only a fraction of what Site Recovery is capable of. You can test the full scope of its possibilities by downloading our full-featured Free Trial.
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