Why Disaster Recovery matter!

First, let's go through the definition of the term "Disaster Recovery" or in short as its commonly used by IT professionals "DR."

From an IT point of view, a disaster is anything that stops the operability of IT services in any organization. IT services, such as Infrastructure failure or cyber attack ... etc.,

The goal of the Disaster Recovery solution is to recover your organization IT services operation to normal situation.

What is "RTO and RPO" and why it is matter?

Recovery Time Objective or "RTO" is the time needed to recover your IT Services operations after a disaster has occurred, You’ll want your RTO to be as short as possible,

Recovery Point Objective or "RPO" is the number of data changes you lose that your company or organization can sustain or how much data changes you can afford to lose if a disaster happened,

For example: if a disaster happened at 11:00 AM and your DR solution can recover your Data with change updated until 10:45 AM then your "RPO" is equal "15 Minutes RPO", if your DR solution can recover your data with changes updated until 11:00 AM then your RPO is equal to "0".

Nutanix Provide multiple DR solutions for various use cases using Asynchronous, Synchronous, and Near Synchronous replication to support infrastructure recovery as part of a complete business continuity plan:

• Asynchronous DR
• Near Synchronous DR
• Cross-Hypervisor DR
• Metro Availability (Synchronous Replication)
• Metro Availability with Witness (Synchronous Replication)
• Cloud Connect to Azure and AWS (Backup to Cloud)
• Nutanix On-Prem Leap
• Xi Leap Disaster Recovery Service (DRaaS)

Asynchronous DR

The Term "Asynchronous Replication" itself means to store and forward approach, in another word, writes data to the primary storage array first and then commits data to be replicated to replication targets based on a specific schedule, 

Nutanix provides native snapshots Per-VM, or per volume group, by using Async DR feature, the RPO would be (up to 1-hour RPO), the snapshot schedule should be equal to your desired RPO, you can set your schedule to 1 Hour or more,

Step by step building and configuring Asynchronous DR using Nutanix Native Async DR feature

• (Part -1) Async DR - Basic setup and Protection Domain Configuration - Click Here
• (Part -2) Async DR - Planned Failover - Click Here
• (Part -3) Async DR - Recover from a disaster - Click Here
• (Part -4) Async DR - Clone a VM from Snapshot - Click Here

Near Synchronous DR

NearSync DR provides the best of both worlds: zero impact to primary I/O latency (like async replication) in addition to a very low RPO (like sync replication (metro). This allows users to have a very low RPO without having the overhead of requiring synchronous replication for writes.

By using NearSync DR feature the RPO would be (up to 1-minute RPO), you can set your schedule to 1 minute to 15 minutes,

Step by step building and configuring Near Synchronous DR using Nutanix Native NearSync DR feature - Click Here

Cross-Hypervisor DR

Nutanix provides cross-hypervisor disaster recovery for migrating and DR services between two sites running different hypervisors (ESXi and AHV Clusters). 

The migration and DR services work with one click and use the Prism data protection workflow, VM can move freely between the hypervisors.

Step by step building and configuring Cross Hypervisor DR using Nutanix Cross-Hypervisor DR feature - Click Here

Metro Availability (Synchronous Replication)

The Term "Synchronous Replication" itself means the process of copying data over a storage area network, local area network or wide area network, so there are multiple, up-to-date copies of the data,

In another word, when any data write happen in the main site another copy is sent to DR and wait for DR confirm that the data is written in DR before committing the data in the main site,  that will make the RPO equal to "0",  it is required that the round trip latency between both sites be equal to or less than "5 ms" Maintain adequate bandwidth to accommodate peak writes. It is also recommended that you have a redundant physical network between both sites.

Step by step building and configuring Metro Availability using Nutanix Metro Availability Synchronous Replication DR feature - Click Here

Metro Availability with Witness

Similar to normal Metro Availability, RPO equal to "0" and even the configuration from Prism is almost the same, the difference is regarding how the system will react to site failure (Failure Handling),

With failure handling set to witness, the surviving cluster obtains the witness lock for the active and standby protection domains. Active protection domains are disabled automatically, which allows VM I/O to resume to those containers. Standby protection domains are automatically promoted, making those containers active for I/O. VMware HA then automatically restarts VMs. Any DRS rules must be manually updated as required to either allow VM restart if using must rule, or prevent migration attempts if the failed site and cluster return to service. The process is similar to that shown in the previous diagram.

Step by Step coming Soon

DR Orchestration (On-prem Leap)

Nutanix Leap will help you setup, configure, orchestrate and automate all the DR services from centralized location from Prism Central, From AOS 5.11 onward, Nutanix adds protection policies and recovery plans to Prism Central for AHV and ESXi, offering an easy way to orchestrate operations around migrations and unplanned failures, Now you can apply orchestration policies from a central location, ensuring consistency across all your sites and clusters, To help manage these new protection policies and recovery plans, Nutanix uses a construct called Availability Zones managed by one Prism Central. An availability zone can also represent a region in Nutanix Xi Cloud Services.

Step by Step coming Soon 

Xi Leap DRaaS

The Xi Leap Service offers a fully integrated DR-to-cloud solution that rapidly and intelligently protects the applications and data in your Nutanix environment without the need to purchase and maintain a separate infrastructure stack. By utilizing the same platform on-premises and in the recovery site, Xi Leap fully eliminates the need for complex translation of constructs, policies, and data models across environments.

Step by Step coming Soon