Source
r/sysadmin•
infinit_e

On-prem to cloud replication?

I’ve been looking on and off since 2019 for A way to do real time, or close to real time replication from my on-prem VMware cluster to Azure. Ideally after a fail over I would like to be able to reverse replication for when we inevitably fail back to on-prem.

I’m currently running Veeam and have the ability to restore to Azure, but depending on the size of the virtual machine that can take hours and really cuts into our RTO. Have any of you found a way to do replication from your on-prem Systems to the cloud, and then back again?

Posted Mar 24, 2022, 11:52 PM UTC

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eruffiniSenior Infrastructure Engineer•

Zerto would be your best bet.

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Pvt-SnafuStorage Admin•

Well, as already mentioned, Zerto can be a good option. If you want active-active replication, your network link would be of the utmost importance. Ideally, Azure Expressroute. Then, you can try Starwinds VSAN to do replication. We have used it locally only and it works great but I also come across this scenario on their website so might be worth checking: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-hybrid-cloud-for-azure

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wells68•

Does this VMWare option, with recovery points every 30 minutes, take hours for a RTO? https://core.vmware.com/resource/vmware-cloud-disaster-recovery-technical-overview

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infinit_eOP•

I was specifically referring to doing a VMware to Azure restore using Veeam. One of my VMs is around 2-3TB, and did take a couple hours to restore.

Ideally I’d like to get to a place where my data lives in multiple locations and we can just do a load balancer or dns failover if something goes down. But we’re not there yet.

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wells68•

I understand that doing the Veeam restore to Azure in the cloud is taking a couple of long hours to complete. If the Veeam engineers don't have a faster VMWare-to-Azure restore option, what if VMWare-to-Azure direct has a faster hot recovery in the cloud option? Would that be worth looking into, or is there a cost issue with a VMWare-to-Azure solution?

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infinit_eOP•

I must have totally missed VMware having a native solution.

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ZAFJB•

replication to Azure

Do your sums. I suspect that you will find that Azure is an expensive place to keep replicas.

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MrSuck•

Have you looked into Azure site recovery? I think it fits all your requirements.

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infinit_eOP•

Actually been testing that this past week. It seems to work pretty well, minimum RPO seems to be 1 hour though. And “reverse replication” actually requires the existing VM to have been completely lost and non-existent.

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tsmith-co•

Are your backups already in Azure object storage that you are restoring from? That will greatly speed up the restore process.

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infinit_eOP•

They are. The server I’m using to perform restores is in Azure and is only aware of the object storage. If I add proxies or resources to the server it may go faster, I have yet to try that though.

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Superb_Raccoon•

Talk about clubbing someone to death with a loaded Uzi…

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infinit_eOP•

Please explain?

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Superb_Raccoon•

There are tools from VMware that will do this and be integrated into VMware

You could also make the environment actually cloud aware and go active-active instead of a DR site.

In

You could have an elegant environment not a hodgepodge of solutions duct taped together

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infinit_eOP•

I’m actively working toward the latter, but I don’t fully own all the applications and the high availability setups require additional complexity that the owners are resisting.

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Superb_Raccoon•

All the better to stop doing it and tell those that do want this that they can’t have it because of those holdouts over there.

This is how environments fragment

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