Hi everyone, welcome to NetApp Insight session 1221-2, session 1221-2, session 1221-2, NetApp Blue XP disaster recovery. In this session, we're going to talk about a relatively uh recent addition to the NetApp Blue XP uh data protection infrastructure uh called disaster recovery as a service. This provides a simple lowcost disaster recovery solution for VMware virtual infrastructures. And we'll go into detail next. Before we begin, while I may not make any comments about future products in the session, we do have a confidentiality agreement as part of NetApp Insight. As part of this session, we're going to set the stage and talk about why you might be interested in this session. We're then going to talk about some of the challenges that NetApp Blue XP disaster recovery addresses and why you would want to use Blue XP disaster recovery for your data protection services and needs. And then we're going to walk through how Blue XP disaster recovery actually works. And to finish up, we're going to talk about some potential future use cases we're thinking about and looking for some feedback. And then we'll finish up with Q&A. So, let's set the stage for a few minutes and let's talk about some of the reasons why you might be here and watching this video. Um, many of you probably are thinking that your DR solutions in general are just too expensive or too complex. uh especially in light of the recent Broadcom uh initiatives, Blue XP disaster recovery can provide a really good alternative to other thirdparty disaster recovery solutions that can be very expensive and or complex. And we'll talk about that in just a few minutes. You may also be want just saying, you know what, I want an as a service. I don't want to manage it myself anymore. And so I want to offload that to a third party like uh somebody that you trust like NetApp. uh and we can manage that DR protection for your VMware environment for you.may be having some challenges uh ensuring that your virtualized infrastructure uh is actually protected. Maybe you don't even have a DR solution in place and you're looking for one today. And this is I think a very simple solution that you'll find a lot of value for. And some of you may be even saying, you know what, my current DR solution just doesn't work for me. Uh I need an alternative. And that could be for a lot of uh different reasons. When we set out to build Blue XP disaster recovery, we wanted to look at it from four key areas that we wanted to address relative to some of the challenges that we've heard from our customers about building a disaster recovery solution for VMware. And these involve uh complexity andthe complexity of the solutions that are out there, the cost of the solutions that are out there, uh the resource demands that these solutions typically require and the reliability or the lack of reliability that a lot of solutions have. And we'll talk about each of these in just a few minutes. So using these four criteria, we built Blue XP disaster recovery as a service. So let's take a look at what Blue XP disaster recovery really is and how it works.So first in general Blue XP disaster recovery is designed to protect virtualized uh infrastructures running on VMware. Now it provides asimple lowcost and what we think is a high performance disaster recovery as a service solution that is built on core ontap functionality. We offer three basic uh use cases. uh the first being that we provide on-prem VMware to on-prem VMware uh for NFS data stores uh as well as for ice scuzzi and fiber channel front-end access VMFS data stores and then finally we offer a VMware onprem to VMC or VMware uh cloud on AWS using Amazon FSX for NetApp on storage. Blue XP disaster recovery is part of our overarching NetApp Blue XP unified control plane and lives within that space and in particular we are one of the four additional services that are provided as part of the protection section of Blue XP disaster recovery alongside backup and recovery replication ransomware protection and of course Blue XP disaster recovery. Now that we've provided a brief overview of what Blue XP disaster recovery is, let's take a quick look at how Blue XP disaster recovery addresses those four challenges we highlighted a few minutes ago.Disaster recovery solutions can be very complex. Many solutions depend on complex choreography of virtual server appliances or VSAs that need to be deployed and maintained. In many cases, you may still have to separately configure and manage the storage layer protection from the virtual layer protection. These create a much more complex solution that is needed to protect your virtual infrastructure. Blue XP disaster recovery does not depend on VSAs at all. In fact, there's nothing to install for the most part. We manage both the storage and the virtual layers through a back-end orchestration for both ONAP and VMware at the same time. So if you're an current Blue XP customer, you already have access to disaster recovery services. There's nothing to install. For new Blue XP customers, all you need to install is the single Blue XP connector required for the overall Blue XP framework. And that can run in the cloud or on premises. And since we are NetApp, we understand how to provide simplified management of ONTAP and SnapMir to simplify data protection for your VMware infrastructure. When we look at cost, the primary challenge is obtaining and paying for those complex solutions. A lot of offerings today focus on a perVM pricing model, which can require long-term contracts that have to be pre purchased. Now, Blue XP disaster recovery is priced on a capacity based model. So, if you have hundreds of VMs that are relatively small to medium size that only consume a relatively small amount of storage, Blue HP is going to be a much more cost-effective solution. We also offer flexible options for licensing with pay as you go incremental pricing or longerterm contracts that can be purchased from NetApp partners directly from NetApp or through a cloud-based marketplace. So if you have some AWS credits to use, you can use those to purchase your licenses for blue XP disaster recovery. DR for virtualized infrastructures is typically very resource intensive, especially if you want to do it in an efficient manner. Many VM DR solutions replicate at the VMware virtual layer and this can result in you losing all of the vulnerable storage efficiencies that ONTAP provides. And if you do try to replicate the data in an efficient manner, your VMs are being uncompressed and recompressed at the virtual layer, which takes more CPU and memory resources that could be used for running your production VMs. Some solutions support storage layer replication like ONAP does. But unlike on tap with blue XP disaster recovery, you will probably have to manage the storage layer protection separately from the virtual layer which can bring back a lot of the complexity issues that we were just uh describing. Now, Blue XP disaster recovery uses native onap snap mirror. This allows us to efficiently replicate data from production to DR sites using our incremental forever replication model with all of the native data compression and dduplication intact. And since we also orchestrate the VMware infrastructure, we can actually support ondemand VM creation and restart reducing the amount of overhead required at the DR site in normal operational scenarios. Finally, many DR solutions because they are complex, costly, and inefficient solutions can be very unreliable simply because it is too difficult to perform DR testing. Also, as business requirements change, the DR solutions may need to even be reconfigured in a timely fashion. Further putting your infrastructure in a precarious situation if a disaster event happens. Blue XP disaster recovery supports non-disruptive DR rehearsals by using native ONTAP flex clone features and the ability to connect your VMs to isolated test network infrastructures. This prevents your DR rehearsal from impacting the running VMs and the VMs continue to be protected by Blue XP disaster recovery. We even support the ability to schedule DR testing so that they are performed during off- peak hours. And if your business requirements change, our [clears throat] simple UI facilitates easy rapid modification of your existing protection plans. So let's dig into the cost area a bit more. A few minutes ago, I said that Blue XP disaster recovery uses a cost structure based on the amount of data that VMs are using and that we need to protect. We don't use pervm charges. But let me clarify that a bit. When we determine the amount of storage used by your protected VMs, we use the on disk or post efficiency consumed storage. So if you have VMs consuming 100 terabytes at the virtual layer, but after ONAP compresses, ddupes and compacts your data to the point where you are only consuming 50 terabytes of on disk capacity,we are charging you for the 50 terabytes, not the 100 terabytes. Our retail prices start at just 3 cents per gigabyte per month, and we offer discounts for longerterm contracts. This chart highlights the cost advantages of capacity based pricing of Blue XP [clears throat] disaster recovery when compared to a perVM pricing structure. The sweet spot for Blue XP disaster recovery is going to be high VM count infrastructure. Your actual cost difference will depend on the DR solution you're currently using and any applied discounts. But we think that Blue XP disaster recovery has a distinct cost advantage versus the competition. So let's see how this thing works. First, Blue XP disaster recovery doesn't require you to focus on protecting your data infrastructure. We do that for you. What you do protect are your VMs and the data that those VMs consume on disk. So, how do we do that? We use three basic constructs to manage virtual infrastructure protection. First, we use a concept of sites.are typically associated with a failure domain. A site could be a physical data center or an AWS region. It could be two different clusters in the same data center. What is important is that a site is where your infrastructure runs and where you will fail over to in the event of a disaster. In this context, a site contains vsenter clusters. Based on these vsenter clusters, we also have associated ontap arrays, but we focus on the vsenter clusters for data protection. Second, we have a resource group. Resource groups are used to combine multiple VMs together so that we can protect them as a single entity. Think of an resource group as your application or a complex solution that you need to protect. For example, maybe we have a point of sales solution with a database VMs, business logic VMs, and web server VMs. You will probably want to protect these as a single solution. Resource groups provide that function. Finally, we have the replication plan. This is the set of rules you use to decide where you are replicating to, what to do with each VM when we fail over or when we test failover, and what are the per what are the actions that need to be performed and most importantly, what is our RPO? Replication plans are applied to resource groups. You can use a single replication plan against multiple resource groups, but you can also create additional replication plans for different resource groups and apply them as needed. Once we have configured all of our replication plans and a replication plan is applied to our resource group, we will then start the DR replication for the volumes that are hosting the VMs. So, let's dig into that process another layer. We apply a replication plan which includes all of the rules that we require for our protection of VMs. That means we have things like source to destination mappings, which venter we want to protect, which vain we want to fail over to. Uh we have a failover process set of rules uh where we can define boot order. uh what we can redefine theVM definition so that we can change the virtual memory size or the number of virtual CPUs that we apply when we're on the DR site. We can run guest scripts within the OS of each VM uh during the failover process. And we can define whether we have a uh an application consistent or crash consistent snapshot being taken so that when we're running VMs that are hosting Oracle or SQL Server databases, we can coordinate with the guest OS to ensure that those uh VMs are properly uh snapshotted. And then finally, of course, we have the recovery point objective or the schedule for our replication. Now, we apply that replication plan to a resource group. And once we do that, we can identify which VMs are in that resource group and what data stores in VSCenter those VMs are hosted on. We can then map those data stores back to their NetApp on volumes. And those could be flex volumes for NFS data stores or LUNs for VMFS data stores. And once we do that, we determine whether there's a snap mirror relationship already in place. And if not, we'll go ahead and create that snapshot that snap mirror relationship and use that uh as theengine for replicating our snapshots to our DR site.Now, when we have a disaster that happens on the production environment, what happens? Well, it is a manual process just like Snap Mirror. You will go into Blue XP disaster recoveries um user interface. You will select the replication plan that you want to fail over and you will select fail over. Uh once that happens that starts the process of breaking the snap mirror relationship bringing those volumes back online on the DR site uh as readr we can then register those volumes and loans as data stores within the DR sites vs venter and then we will start launching those VMs based on the rules uh for the failover process that we defined in our replication plan. Now, let's take a look at the key features that I think Blue XP provides that makes it such a valuable tool in protecting your virtualized infrastructure. The first feature we're going to talk about is VM reconfiguration.Once we understand that, we can talk about database aware backup capabilities for VMs that are hosting databases such as Oracle or SQL Server. And then we're going to talk about a unique feature I think that's really valuable and takes advantage of the ONTAP architecture, which is non-disruptive test failovers. The ability to reconfigure your VMs is one of the core features that is required for any DR solution that's focused on virtualized infrastructure. The first section we want to talk about in terms of VM reconfiguration is networking. Within the resource group, we can map the source V switches or V networks that the VMs are connected toa different set of V switches or V networks uh in the DR site uh in VSCenter. Once we do that, we can also change the uh the IP addresses. We can change the DNS settings, [clears throat] gateway settings, and subnet settings to allow us to connect to those new V switches. And then if we want to, we can actually leverage and decide whether we want to use the exact same configuration of IP addresses that the source side uses so that we have a layer 2 network uh the same basic layer 2 subnet on each source cluster and the DR cluster. Or we can change those static IP addresses as we show here uh within this uh user interface uh to allow us to change it on a pervm basis as well as the subnet mass DNS and gateway or we can leverage DHCP and allow a DHCP instance to provide us with IP addresses while we're in the DR scenario. So totally reconfiguring the network infrastructure. The second area we want to talk about is VM compute. So changing the compute settings, the definition of each VM and we can do that by allowing us to change the number of virtual CPUs, the amount of virtual DRAM that we are configuring each VM to use while in the DR scenario. This means for example if I have a DR vCenter cluster with not as many cores available or the nodes don't have enough DRAM to support the same settings that I have in production I can reduce those by changing those uh vCPU and virtual DRAM or VD RAM settings. And lastly one of the things that we can do is we can actually set up a uh boot order and boot delay uh between each VM. Uh and as you can see in this upper in this section here uh to the right we have aboot delay where we can define the number of seconds uh that we will delay between the start of the SQL VM1 and the Oracle VM that's shown here in the display. And finally we have the ability to run custom guest scripts within each or any of the VMs individually or all of them at the same time. So we have a universal script that we can run across all VMs. We also allow provide the ability to provide a script uh for each VM individually. And when we do select this and we click the pencil button here beside uh one of our VMs, we'll get this dialogue box that's shownhere to allow us to add a script. Now this scripting also supports different arguments. So we can do command line arguments and within uh we support multiple types of scripting languages. So in Linux we support pretty much any shell script capability. U within Windows we support batch and we support PowerShell scripting as well. So these are all very uh powerful options that we can use for VM reconfiguration. Another advanced capability for Blue XP disaster recovery is the ability to create application consistent replicas of VMs hosting Oracle or SQL Server databases running within Linux or Windows VMs. We can do that simply by checking the box under create application consistent replicas for the specific VMs that we want to protect. When we are using Windows, Blue XP disaster recovery integrates with VSSS integration to coordinate the backup and snapshot of the Oracle and SQL Server database engines. And for Linux, we leverage the same scripting engines and algorithms that we use for our NetApp snap mirror capabilities when backing up Oracle databases on Linux operating systems. Now earlier we mentioned that we could perform test failovers of our virtual infrastructure to allow us to test the rep our replication plans without impacting our production environment. The way we do that is when we build our replication plan or even modify it after we've already created our replication plan, we can indicate that we want to create a test infrastructure for test failover. Uh so we can separate that from a and create a different set of settings from our production environment and our production failover plan to a spec a dedicated uh test failover plan uh which allows us to isolate the VMs that we're going to test with uh into different uh vsenters if we want but more importantly to a different v switch or a different set of networks and that allows us to isolate the virtual machines that we're testing with so that they don't conflict with the production environment that uh is running uh and continuing to run in our data center. Now, how does this work? So, we've already said that we're using snap mirror as our replication engine. And we're going to use another netapp functionality uh feature called flex clones that will actually allow us to create clones of those DR volumes uh that we're replicate that we're protecting in the DR site. mount those uh flex clone volumes uh as the data center or the data stores within VSCenter and then launch those VMs using the new set of rules that we've defined in our test environment. Now that we've seen some of the interesting features that Blue XP Disaster Recovery provides, I want to remind everyone that Blue XP Disaster Recovery offers a capacity unlimited 30-day free trial so that you can try this out with your own virtualized infrastructure running on ONTAP. So, I do encourage you to sign up for our free trial. And that's Blue XP Disaster Recovery in a nutshell. There's three key takeaways that I want you to take from this presentation today. First, Blue XP disaster recovery is a cost-effective solution for protecting your virtualized infrastructures leveraging ONTAP storage and ONTAP data replication. Second, Blue XP disaster recovery provides a lot of advanced failover and orchestration features, allowing you to customize your failover process with VM and network reconfiguration capabilities, as well as the ability to run userdefined scripting and perform advanced database integrations as well as providing an ability to perform test failovers without disrupting your production environment. And finally, I want everybody to remember that we offer a 30-day free trial and we offer a set of labs on demand that allow you to test drive disaster recovery in a safe environment or using your production environment with the 30-day free trial. There are a variety of resources available as you go through your disaster recovery journey for your virtualized infrastructure. First, we offer our documentation. We offer a set of blogs in our tech ontap blogs community uh at netapp.com as well as the blue xp disaster recovery lab on demand. All of these resources are available and will be updated on a regular basis. And of always we want you to stay connected. Uh here's some links uh that allow you to integrate uh interact with uh NetApp uh as well as my contact information here on X uh or Twitter. Tell us what you thought by filling out the survey at the end of this video. I want to thank everyone for attending and I hope that you enjoy the rest of the conference.