VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery in the wild

It’s time for a review after running VCDR over two years in production at different customer sites. I’m very pleased with the solution. We run every 6 months DR tests at every customer to validate the solution and every time it just works. After doing the customer use case testing, we run the ransomware recovery workflow to test the systems for malware behavior as well as vulnerabilities. We get a nice list from Carbon Black with all the vulnerabilities who must be addressed with patching.

The deployment of VCDR was always easy and keeps improving in the best way possible. With the recent announcement VCDR is transforming to VMware Life Recovery and also changing a bit from the pricing perspective. Hopefully the VCF division will also start again the MSP route-to-market which is called CSP-SaaS under Broadcom.

One of the best things of VCDR is that it just works. You no longer discuss and test if the workloads are running and can connect with each other. You have vSphere On-Prem and you have it with VCDR on VMC-A. We can just focus to the important parts. How does the user connect to the DR site? Which services need to be published? And you know what? It all can be tested without interrupting the production. VCDR is air-gapped from your production. This is one of the most important parts for DR testing. You must test it regularly to make sure all the changes to production have been implemented on the DR site or have no impact to the DR site.

If you are still one of the people who thinks that a good backup solution is a DR, then you are wrong. DR is complementary to backup. You need to have a DR solution in place if you face ransomware. I have been involved in many ransomware cases and all of them has one in common. You will not be able to recovery any VM for at least 48 hours as the cyber forensics investigate the attack. You can start when forensics is finished. Not any minutes before! Please take that personal.