Configure Offsite Disaster Recovery Copy

A crucial aspect of disaster recovery is the ability to provide an offsite disaster recovery site. This provides site resiliency. If you lose an entire production site, you can failover to the secondary DR location and funnel traffic over to the DR location. In addition to creating “replica” virtual machines of production workloads, it is important that we have offsite DR copies of backup data. The golden rule of disaster recovery is always have more than one copy of production data, including production backup data. In this post, let’s take a look at how to configure offsite disaster recovery copy with Vembu BDR Suite.

Configure Offsite Disaster Recovery Copy

Using an offsite disaster recovery copy, we can essentially create copies of production backups in another location in a DR facility, etc.  This is important for obvious reasons as we don’t want to have all our “eggs in one basket” when it comes to backup data.  If we lose a main production location, we don’t want to also lose all of our backup data.

Vembu BDR Suite allows creating an Offsite DR copy utilizing Vembu BDR OffsiteDR server.  This is the “on-premise” version of the cloud DR product that allows copying data to the Vembu cloud for storage.  Using the Vembu BDR Suite Offsite DR Server, you can stand up a server on premise or in your private enterprise cloud and copy production backups in a very straightforward, intuitive manner.

Installing Vembu OffsiteDR Server

Installing Vembu Offsite DR Server is super easy as it is for the most part, a “next, next, finish” type of install.  Just as a quick run through however, below we take a look at the installation process.  As mentioned the OffsiteDR is a standalone product aside from Vembu BDR Suite.  You will need to have an existing BDR Suite server up and running in order to connect the OffsiteDR server into the Vembu infrastructure.  After downloading the standalone OffsiteDR server, we run the installation.

Configuring Vembu Offsite Copy Configuration

To configure the Offsite DR copy of the backup data, we login to the main Vembu BDR Suite server console and navigate to the Management >> Offsite Copy Management >> Offsite Copy Configuration screen.

Here we flag on the toggle for the Offsite Copy Management and select the My Own Data Center option.  Click the “+” button next to the Configured DR Location.  This allows us to add the new OffsiteDR server configured.

After entering the IP address, click the Test Connection button.

Hitting the Test Connection button runs a series of connectivity tests to make sure the OffsiteDR server is configured correctly for copy replication.  Click the Add OffisteDR Server button to add the server.

Now, we can Save Replication Settings which saves the configuration.

We can now run a backup of a virtual machine.

Shortly after, we can navigate to the Dashboard of the OffsiteDR server and see the replication in progress or successful.  The asynchronous replication of the backup data copies the data from the primary Vembu BDR Server to the newly configured OffsiteDR server.

From the Dashboard of the Vembu BDR side of things, we should see similar – replication completed successfully.

Restore Virtual Machine from Offsite DR Server

The great thing about the Vembu OffsiteDR server is we have all the options available to restore from our Offsite DR server.  We can select to Restore or Mount the backups.

Once we select to restore the backup, we can select the usual restore options such as live recovery, file level recovery, disk level recovery, etc.

Thoughts

Having offsite DR copies of backup data is extremely important.  Along with having standby replica virtual machines, having the offsite copy of backup data provides resiliency with production data backups in case an entire site is lost along with the primary backups, the backup copy will allow access to restoring data from this second copy of backup data.  Vembu BDR Suite has an extremely easy built-in mechanism to configure offsite copies of production backups by utilizing the Vembu BDR OffsiteDR server.  You can easily stand up an OffsiteDR server and configure the Offsite copy management to target the new server for copying backup data.  This is a great way to ensure you have multiple copies of production backups.  Additionally, Vembu offers the Offsite Cloud copy which allows creating an “Offsite DR” literally in the cloud for organizations that may not have an additional facility or DR location to stand up the OffsiteDR server component.  Check out Vembu BDR Suite and the numerous abilities it affords for disaster recovery.