Today EMC introduced a special product in the data protection space which I have been a big fan of over many years – RecoverPoint for VMs.
Having used the traditional RecoverPoint appliances it is all the more great to have data protection at the hypervisor level with all the cool features that RecoverPoint provides and its a very stable product. I was invited to a secret briefing at VMworld yesterday which was in addition to my exclusive conversation with the EMC CTO for Data Mobility Business Unit (RecoverPoint & vPlex). So here is the all you want to know about ‘RecoverPoint for VMs’
It will allow organizations to:
- Accelerate Data Protection As A Service For Hybrid Clouds
- Empower Data Owners With Application Recoverability & Accessibility
- Reduce Protection Cost And Complexity
(click to enlarge)
Powered using the same underlying and hugely popular technology – RecoverPoint for VMs offers local and remote protection. The Virtual Appliance will maintain a journal volume and offer data protection on Virtual Machine basis using a new vCenter plugin.
It is designed for easy and fast deployment – using wizard driven tools (deployment manager) and configuration is very straightforward – especially for those who already run RecoverPoint and are familiar with the interface.
The splitter runs at a hypervisor level and the vCenter plugin discovers the entire infrastructure without requiring a separate UI. All you do is deploy simple OVF file (appliance). The goal is to empower VMware admins to manage data protection, protect critical infrastructure, and orchestrate failover or recovery.
RecoverPoint for VM’s is different than SRM
I would like to provide this level of clarity and I discussed this yesterday with their CTO. Because the splitter runs at Hypervisor level it is easy to manage data protection on a VM basis and thus makes the use of SRM redundant. An added advantage of using RecoverPoint for VMs is that you don’t need to manage data protection at LUN or datastore level. Thus you can mix and match VMs inside a datastore and make maximum use of datastore space. Earlier you had to separate your data protection workload into datastores that could be a part of Consistency group and had to keep other critical VMs out of there if performing application based failover. All those constraints are now relieved and there is great control on the recovery mechanism.
Workflows are wizard driven, protection can be setup across multiple consistency groups or multiple VMware clusters (without requiring separate protection appliances), and write order fidelity can be assured spanning multiple VMs, or across multiple ESXi clusters.
A cool thing is that changes to the ESXi infrastructure can be made on the fly and RecoverPoint for VMs dynamically addresses that. You can Add/Remove VMDK’s from protected VMs and the system will auto provision VMDKs on the target side.
vMotion or Storage vMotion does not affect data protection for the Protected VMs.
Licensing
Since RecoverPoint for VMs is at a VM level the licensing is based on virtual machines. A minimum of 15 VM license needs to be purchased to begin with this software and discounts are available based on volume. There is no transfer of license between traditional RecoverPoint and RecoverPoint for VMs since the software is entirely different.
When you can get your hands on it
EMC will offer trial licenses in October 2014 and I am sure many VMware admins will want to test this out.
For Cloud Providers and those performing Hybrid Cloud computing this is a great solution when it comes to protecting mission critical workloads using RecoverPoint
Some key technical details with a disclaimer – these information below may change down the road and was only made available based on current testing of beta product
- A minimum of 2 appliances will have to be deployed per site (source and destination) to ensure high availability and failover
- Maximum of 8 appliances can be deployed for larger environments and maximum performance
- Site Recovery orchestration built into RecoverPoint for VMs