Delivering Disaster Recovery Testing That’s as Easy as 1-2-3

Jason Reid Blogs

 

Regular disaster recovery testing is a necessary evil, but it needn’t be painful. AssureStor delivers effective testing that’s as easy as 1-2-3.

Talk to most people in IT, and annual disaster recovery testing is something that they would like to avoid. The loss of a weekend, coupled with the stress of trying to make something work that you last looked at a year ago, isn’t fun for anyone. Yet the importance of testing your disaster recovery capabilities can’t be overstated: as most of us know in IT, if it can go wrong it will, and it won’t be at a convenient time.

So what if we told you that you can perform disaster recovery testing from the comfort of your desk, using no more than three clicks of the mouse? In this blog post we’ll demonstrate how disaster recovery testing can be made as simple as 1-2-3, even in a live environment.

Utilising the AssureStor dr2cloud Platform

Straightforward disaster recovery testing is achieved using AssureStor’s dr2cloud platform. Based on the latest Zerto Virtual Replication software, dr2cloud delivers a hypervisor-based replication service that can protect both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments.

For the purposes of this exercise, we will assume that we have configured and protected our virtual machines and everything is running as expected. So, how can we confirm that our disaster recovery protection is working, and that we can really recover a server from it?

Access the dr2cloud web console and from the dashboard screen, ensure that the ‘Failover’ option is set to ‘Test’, and click ‘Failover’.

Easy Disaster Recovery Testing

Step One

First, we need to select the VPG (Virtual Protection Group) that we wish to failover test. In this example we have selected the VPG labelled ‘TEST001’. Click ‘Next’.

Easy Disaster Recovery Testing

Step Two

We are now presented with the virtual machines that are contained within the VPG. Here, we have the option if we wish to modify the Checkpoint, Boot Order, and Scripts. For this example, we have a single virtual machine protected by the VPG and we will leave the Checkpoint as the default (which is the latest checkpoint available). Click ‘Next’.

Easy Disaster Recovery Testing

A Note on Checkpoints

As a near-synchronous replication solution, you may not wish to recover from a Checkpoint (recovery point) that is only seconds ago. For example, if you have discovered corruption on a server you may need to recover the system from several hours ago. dr2cloud allows for this through the use of Checkpoints, which are created automatically every few seconds and are stored for 24 hours. These can be selected by clicking over the currently displayed Checkpoint.

Easy Disaster Recovery Testing

Step Three

This is the final step. We are told that we are about to perform a test using one of our three available VPGs. If we are happy with our selection we now click ‘Start Failover Test’ and that’s it! As easy as 1-2-3.

Easy Disaster Recovery Testing

So What Happens Now?

Once we click ‘Start Failover Test’, the dr2cloud platform will start to build the test virtual machine from the replicated data. It will present this in a dedicated vCloud Director-enabled virtual data centre. From the vCloud Director portal, we can now access and control the server as if it were in our own hypervisor platform.

Easy Disaster Recovery Testing

Disaster Recovery Testing That’s as Easy as 1-2-3

dr2cloud makes disaster recovery testing easy and safe, without limiting you to ineffective sandbox tests. The AssureStor dr2cloud platform delivers an established cloud-based Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution, providing guaranteed recovery of your entire IT estate in the event of a disaster. Trusted by a wide range of organisations including financial institutions, aerospace, and local government, AssureStor provides extreme data protection of your most critical IT systems.

If you would like more information on how AssureStor’s dr2cloud platform can protect your virtual IT environment please contact us for a free, no obligation review of your disaster recovery needs.