VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR) Solution Deployment and Configuration Part 1

In my previous blog post, I have explained about VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR) Solution. In this post, I will cover how you can subscribe to the solution, benefits, and Onboarding procedure.

VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery offers on-demand disaster recovery, delivered as an easy-to-use SaaS solution, with cloud economics. It combines cost-efficient cloud storage with simple SaaS-based management for IT resiliency at scale. Customers benefit from consistent VMware operations across production and DR sites and a ‘pay when you need’ failover capacity model for disaster recovery (DR) resources. VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery can protect a very broad set of IT services in a cost-efficient manner, with fast recovery capabilities (On-demand DRaaS).

VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery Benefits

• Flexible Deployment Options:- Get the flexibility to choose between deployment options—set up failover capacity 100% on-demand or with a minimal footprint.
• Optimized Costs:- Leverage the elasticity and reliability of the cloud to balance effective DR operations and optimized IT resource allocation to achieve up to 60% lower TCO.
• VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery spins up VMware Cloud on AWS infrastructure only during a DR testing or failover event. It utilizes a highly efficient cloud storage layer for storing backups, lowering DR costs.
• Easy-to-Use:- Get DR that’s SaaS-simple. Use a consistent operating experience on-premises and in the cloud with automated failover and failback.
• VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC ON AWS) is the DR Target
• VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery maintains VMs in their native vSphere format and eliminates the need for brittle and time-consuming VM disk format conversions.
• The VMware Site Recovery and VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery DR target on VMware Cloud on AWS is fully maintained and supported by VMware, relieving your organization from the need to set up a secure environment, maintain hardware, and manage the lifecycle of your infrastructure stack
• No longer need to own and continuously maintain a secondary DR site.
• You can utilize an efficient cloud storage layer provided by the service to store your backups during the steady-state and only consume failover compute and primary storage capacity when a disaster event occurs.
• This service provides an operationally consistent and familiar vSphere experience across the production and DR sites, so your IT staff doesn’t need to learn new tools.

VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery Features

Pilot Light:- Provision a small failover footprint capacity in the cloud and scale on-demand.

Instant Power-On:- Instantly power on your VMs in the cloud when testing or orchestrating your DR plans.

Immutable Snapshots:- Protect your data from malware thanks to a deep history of immutable snapshots.

Detailed DR Reports:- Provide proof that DR plans are being tested and executed correctly.

Delta-based Failback:- Minimize failback cloud egress charges and optimize DR operational costs

Continuous DR Health Checks:-DR health checks are automatically run every 30 minutes for increased reliability.

VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery Pricing

VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery pricing is very flexible it is a combination of a per-TiB charge based on the protected storage capacity and a per virtual machine charge based on the number of protected VMs (total price = $/TiB + $/VM). To use the offering, you must purchase a committed term subscription for either a 1- or 3-year term for the per-TiB part (for a minimum quantity of 10 TiB).

More about Pricing Refer VMware Site

How to Subscribe VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR)

You can subscribe to the solution with a 1-year Subscription and a 3-year Subscription option. You can contact VMware directly or VMware partner for subscribing to this solution.

VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery on Boarding

Once you have received an email from the VMware team as you have purchased the solution, credits will be added to your VMware account. Next step you will receive an onboarding email to and the VMware Customer Success team that will help you with the onboarding procedure.

• The invitation link will be similar to below

Note: – xxx – this will be an alphanumeric number specific to each subscription

• Click on the invitation and log in with your registered VMware account user name and password

Fill in the required details Organization Name, Address, select the payment method and agree on the terms and conditions and click Continue

Note:- Once you place an order for VCDR the credits will be available in your account, example in our demo lab it shows as 27,500.00 and expiry

Select the address to confirm the correct address and the process will be started

In few minutes you will be navigated to the home page

From the right side of the home page, you can click on organization and  you can view the Organization ID and Long organization ID

There will another link which you will receive from the customer success team to do the next step, it will be similar to the invitation link

From the link, you will be able to view the organization we created and click on continue

Provide the contact information to proceed with the deployment of VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery

Once you entered the correct contact information click on Request Deployment

Now the initial phase of  VMware Cloud on Disaster Recovery (VCDR) has been completed. After the deployment is completed VCDR team will contact you for further configuration.

Stay tuned for the next Blog on VMware Cloud on Disaster Recovery (VCDR) Configuration