App Volumes Replication

[JohnnyBravo]

Hi,

My company is looking to integrate disaster recovery for our AppVolumes solution.

We have 2 datacenters but only one vCenter Server. The RTO of the business is such that replicating our vCenter and bringing this up manually in DR is acceptable.

We have a Standard SQL Server for AppVolumes which is protected by FT - it is not possible to change this to Always On.

We have a VSAN in DC1 for desktops and AppStacks and currently replicate AppStacks to a VNX at Primary using Storage Groups.

The servers are on the primary VNX and replicated to DR.

I've put some logical thought into this but not sure whether its technically possible so needing some advice;

1a. Within AppVolumes configure my 2 x AppStack VMDKs to replicate to VNX storage in DR (set as unusable)

OR

1b Replicate the replicated AppStack VMDKs from the production VNX to DR VNX

THEN

2. Replicate vCenter Server, SQL and AppVolumes with RecoverPoint

3. Bring up vCenter and SQL at DR (as per standard / proven recovery processes)

4a. Bring up AppVolumes Server and set the VMDKs as useable

OR

4b. Configure AppVolumes to use the replicated AppStacks on the VNX - not sure how AppVolumes will deal with the new LUN

Hope this makes sense and there is a simple solution.

Thanks

JB

[Ray_handels]

1a. Within AppVolumes configure my 2 x AppStack VMDKs to replicate to VNX storage in DR (set as unusable)

If you let Appvolumes do the sync automatically you cannot set it to unusable. It will also use these appstacks if available but is that an issue? You can set Appvolumes to always use local storage. It will then use the Appstacks that are located on the same Datastore as the VDI machines are on.

Looking at Appvolumes DR. You need to have the database and a datastore that you can connect to. We have 2 Appvolumes servers in an F5 cluster but this is for HA.

If any of the Appvolumes servers crahs you can simply install a new server and set it to the current Database. Also if both appvolumes servers would crash I would still be able to install them both from scratch, point them to the database and I'm good to go.

The database also holds all information regarding Datastores. If you have a DR datastore that is not added into the Appvolumes condiguration it will not see these Appstacks and thus not use them. You could however (in a worst case scenario) install Appvolumes, create a new configutration, point it to this DR datastore and just do an import. It will then check for the Cloudvolumes\appstacks and cloudvolumes\writable folder on the selected datastore and import all these disks into the database. Only thing you need to do is assign the appstacks again.