The goal of disaster recovery process is to return your virtual infrastructure to a fully operational state without considerable interruptions. Having a disaster recovery solution in place is crucial because a system downtime or data loss can translate into lost customers, lost revenue, and lower productivity of your business. Before any sort of interruption occurs, you need to safeguard your infrastructure by deploying a data protection solution that has the ability to quickly and efficiently protect and recover your VMware VMs.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides disaster recovery features that can help you protect your VMs and reduce recovery times. NAKIVO Backup & Replication enables you to establish a near-instant disaster recovery process with VM replication.

VM Replication

VM Replication can dramatically reduce costs and time needed for disaster recovery. VM Replication creates and maintains copies of source VMs (called VM replicas) on a target ESXi server. Recovering from a disaster becomes as simple as powering on VM replicas.

With NAKIVO, you can add individual VMs and VMware containers (resource pools, folders, hosts, clusters) to a replication job, thus ensuring that all your important VMs are always replicated. In addition, you can create up to 30 recovery points per VM replica, so if a VM was damaged and then replicated you can still revert the VM replica back to a previous good state. For more information, see VM Replication.

VM Failover and Failback

VM failover is a process of moving your workloads from a production site to a disaster recovery site. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, resuming business operations is as simple as just powering on VM replicas that take over the role of source VMs.

When the consequences of the disaster are eliminated and your virtual infrastructure is restored, you may want to return your workloads back to the primary site with the failback process. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can replicate your VMs back to the production site and resume normal business operations at your primary site.

RTO & RPO

NAKIVO Backup & Replication focuses on improving your recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) for your virtual infrastructure. RPO is the point in time to which your VMs will be restored in case of a disaster. When an RPO is short, it means that data was recovered close to the point of system failure. RTO measures the duration of time that it should take to restore your virtual infrastructure. Continuous data protection can translate into shorter RTO.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides a number of features designed to improve RPO & RTO:

• Forever Incremental Jobs - After initial VM replication, all subsequent job runs in NAKIVO Backup & Replication are forever incremental and do not require periodic full runs, thus reducing replication windows.
• VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) - With the CBT technology, NAKIVO Backup & Replication can quickly identify which data blocks have changed since the last job run, which significantly increases the job speed.
• Network Acceleration - The built-in network acceleration feature enables replicating VMware VMs over WAN up to 2X faster. NAKIVO Backup & Replication uses compression and traffic reduction techniques to speed up data transfer, so that replication jobs run faster.
• Direct SAN Access - With Direct SAN Access mode, you can considerably increase the speed of VM replication jobs, while decreasing the load on your production network. 

How VM Disaster Recovery Works?

NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides disaster recovery via VM replication. Once your VMs have been replicated, you can fail over to your disaster recovery site simply by creating and running a recovery job in NAKIVO Backup & Replication. During failover, NAKIVO Backup & Replication reverts VM replicas to the necessary recovery points (VM snapshots) and then powers on the VM replicas. Since replicas are regular VMware VMs, and recovery points are regular VM snapshots, this can even be done via vSphere client in case NAKIVO Backup & Replication is inaccessible. To perform failback, you simply need to replicate VM replicas back to the production site and power them on.