Understanding Veeam Availability Orchestrator terminology

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When it comes to creating disaster recovery (DR) plans, Veeam Availability Orchestrator makes it easy to ensure your data is available when disaster strikes. Beyond creating what we call a Failover Plan in Veeam Availability Orchestrator, we also ensure that our DR plans are tested successfully on a regular basis, with the documentation to prove it. This documentation can also be used for compliance, auditing, and ensuring members of an organization know the state of the DR plan at all times.

You may be asking yourself, “What is a Failover Plan?” after reading the first paragraph of this post. Don’t worry, we are about to explore what they are, as well as other terms we commonly use when talking about Veeam Availability Orchestrator.

A Failover Plan is what is created in Veeam Availability Orchestrator to protect applications. The Failover Plan is central to an organization’s DR plan. The goal of the Failover Plan is to make failovers (and fail backs) as simple as possible. Within a Failover Plan, there are a number of Plan Components, which are added to the Failover Plan to meet the business’ requirements.

VM Groups contain the virtual machines (VMs) we are ensuring Hyper-Availability for in the event of a disaster. The VM Groups are powered by VMware vSphere Tags. VMs are simply tagged in vCenter, and the vSphere Tag name will appear in Veeam Availability Orchestrator as shown in the screenshot above. Plan Steps are the steps taken on the VMs during a failover. This includes a number of Application Verification steps available out of the box including verification of applications such as Exchange, SQL, IIS, Domain Controllers, and DNS. Credentials for verifying the applications are also one of the plan components. In addition to these built in application verification tests, Custom Steps can also be added to the Plan Components, allowing organizations to leverage already existing DR scripts.

Template Jobs ensure data is backed up and kept available during a failover scenario. They are created in Veeam Backup & Replication and then added to a Failover Plan during creation. Another big component of a Failover Plan is a Virtual Lab, which we refer to as a Veeam Data Lab. Veeam Data Labs allow for an isolated copy of a production application to be created and tested against. When we are finished using this copy of the data, we simply delete it without ever having impacted or changed our actual production data. This allows for Virtual Lab Tests to be performed to prove recoverability, and the corresponding Test Execution Report to be generated.

We all know how difficult testing DR plans used to be. We would spend a few days locked in the data center, without even getting the applications running correctly. We would say it would get fixed “next time,” but we all know the truth was often that these broken DR plans were never fixed. Veeam Availability Orchestrator removes this overhead, and allows for quick and easy testing without impacting production. In the event a test fails, the Test Execution Report shows us exactly what went wrong so we can fix it.

Before we run a Virtual Lab Test, we first run a Readiness Check on our Failover Plan, and yes, this also comes with a Readiness Check Report so we can easily see the state of our DR plan. This is a lightweight test that is performed to ensure we are ready to failover at a moment’s notice. Best of all, this check can be scheduled to run daily, along with a Plan Definition Report. The Plan Definition Report shows us exactly what is in a Failover Plan, including the VMs in a VM Group and all of our Plan Steps. This report also shows any changes so we have a full audit trail of our DR plan.

As you can tell by this image, our Failover Plans are ready in the event of a failover. They are listed as a “verified” state which means we have successfully run a Virtual Lab Test and a Readiness Check, both of which can be scheduled to run as often as we would like. We can also ensure reports are sent to key stakeholders when the checks are run.

In the event of a failover, which we can trigger on demand or schedule, an Execution Report will be generated. This will detail the steps taken as part of the Failover Plan on the VMs in a VM Group, and show that the application has been successfully verified and is running in the DR site. We know the execution of a Failover Plan will be successful since we have already tested it successfully.

Sources: Veeam Blog

Need disaster recovery? Do not hesitate to contact us at sales@zettagrid.id or call to +62 811 28 38 78

5 Questions About VMware’s Stake in the Native Public Cloud

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Native public clouds are critical to the digital future of organizations worldwide. Known for bringing consistent infrastructure and operations to private and hybrid clouds, VMware has emerged as an indispensable partner to IT organizations on the journey to the native public cloud.

Moreover, Milin Desai, general manager of VMware Cloud Services, wants to make it very clear to everyone: VMware is not only serious about supporting customers who are adopting native public clouds, but also delivering real value for customers running applications in native cloud environments. Recent announcements—including the introduction of VMware Kubernetes Engine (VKE) and the addition of 35 new integrations to Wavefront—demonstrate the company’s commitment to bringing continuous innovations and new value not only to clouds based on VMware Cloud infrastructure but also to public cloud environments.

Below, find out more about the native public cloud strategy of an IT industry pioneer.

 

Q&A: Milin Desai with the Latest on VMware Cloud Services

  1. How does public cloud adoption factor into VMware’s vision and strategy?

At VMware, we enable choice. When we pioneered server virtualization, we provided data center operators a choice over hardware by abstracting physical compute and memory from their existing, underlying infrastructure. In the past decade, we extended that principle to networks, storage, operations and management, meeting the customer on their terms.

Now, as IT transitions to public and managed clouds as a destination for their applications, we enable customers to choose whichever cloud environment best meets their business needs. We do that by offering a valuable set of cloud services for whichever path IT chooses: extending existing VMware workloads to a hybrid cloud, natively operating VMware workloads in a public cloud or managing and securing VMware workloads in a multi-cloud environment.

  1. How is VMware helping customers as they adopt native public clouds?

Public cloud adoption changes the dynamics of our customers’ organizations. It is critical that we understand the primary use cases and concerns emerging as a result of the adoption and usage of public clouds, including these three distinct decision-makers:

  1. Central ITis increasingly tasked to extend beyond the data center to leverage and benefit from public clouds. Many organizations mandate a “cloud-first” initiative. Today we enable this team to start getting the business and agility benefits of the cloud without having to re-tune or rethink everything. We do this by delivering the VMware software-defined experience (as a service) with global partners like IBM, Rackspace and OVH, as well as with offerings such as VMware Cloud on AWS in partnership with Amazon. Customers leverage this capability to accelerate their go-live disaster recovery plans from months to weeks, to migrate and evacuate regional data centers in days as opposed to months and to optimize and reduce spending without additional retooling and retraining. Additionally, with these innovations central IT gains the luxury of infinitely scalable and globally available capacity consumed as an operating expense, with consistent management, security and
  2. App development teamsuse open frameworks (g., Jenkins, Prometheus, K8s, Terraform, etc.) and choose public cloud services that enable them to build the most innovative applications. VMware is starting to engage with this audience via offers around K8s (both as a product with Pivotal Container Service or as a fully managed service with VKE), and a cloud-scale metrics collection platform (Wavefront by VMware) without compromising developers’ choice of frameworks or clouds. Increasingly we also talk to them about delivering compliance as code thereby enabling them to adhere to corporate standards as part of the CI/CD pipeline.
  3. Cloud operationsis an emerging function in IT that ensures business controls are maintained without imposing a central gate on public cloud adoption. The tools that this organization uses can be categorized as “just-in-time” to enable compliance, cost and ongoing cloud operations. At VMware, we offer services that deliver core capabilities to this audience so they can help manage a multi-cloud environment that provides infrastructure and services in a frictionless fashion.

Our services provide capabilities that appeal to these very unique users. This helps reduce tool sprawl, which has attendant issues of price, complexity and integrability. As an example, Wavefront can be used by developers to instrument and monitor their applications, as well as by cloud operators to monitor their cloud infrastructure (e.g., instances, storage, Database as a Service, serverless and more).

  1. What is VMware’s approach to building services for the public cloud?

All of our cloud services, whether built from the ground up or acquired, are architected and engineered to serve a multi-cloud reality. VMware focuses on leveraging the latest cloud-native, “born in the cloud,” approaches to building our SaaS offerings. This, in turn, builds deep empathy and understanding of what real application developers and public cloud operators contend with regularly.

We build on our core value proposition of managing and operating private clouds while embracing newer approaches both organically and inorganically. For example, we extended the VMware SDDC to the public clouds through our partnerships, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM Cloud. Additionally, our expanding portfolio of services helps solve multi-cloud problems. The recently launched VMware Kubernetes Engine is a new service that delivers dial-tone Kubernetes (K8s) in the native public cloud. On the other hand, we acquired CloudCoreo, a security and compliance solution, to provide robust coverage whether the workload is in the data center or the public cloud.

  1. How does VMware make the numerous cloud services available into a fast, frictionless experience for IT?

By understanding these different decision-makers and their needs, we enable IT teams to win and collaborate. Delivering a delightful experience is vital to succeed in this new world. That starts with simple things like bring-your-own enterprise identity, self-service demos, integrated learning and help modules and more. The goal is to enable IT to get to their outcomes with the least amount of friction.

Multi-cloud computing could create blind spots and give rise to new operational silos within an organization. To help overcome these issues, our software-as-a-service cloud services help customers visualize, manage, secure and operate their multi-cloud environments with the same consistency they have come to expect from their VMware software-defined data center (SDDC) stack.

  1. What’s next for VMware Cloud Services?

We are focused on delivering faster time to value while providing a more simplified experience, whether the application is private, hosted or public. With this fundamental principle, we are focused on two essential elements going forward with cloud services:

  1. Deliver a set of solutions that help manage, secure and operate applications running on VMware-based clouds and public clouds.
  2. Deliver capabilities to refactor existing applications or build new applications with their choice of destination and ecosystem all while working with community-based frameworks.

Sources: VMware/Radius

Need cloud computing? Do not hesitate to contact us at sales@zettagrid.id or call to +62 811 28 38 78

A Clear Case for Cloud: Why CIOs Often Start with These Apps

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For CIOs just starting a journey to the cloud, here’s where the technology’s impact immediately shines.

Anyone who has ever doubted IT’s significant impact on a company’s top line hasn’t considered how much can go wrong during the delivery of digital products, services and experiences to customers. Across industries, that final, critical moment when customers decide whether to spend their money or time on a company could be determined by the availability and performance of a website or app.

Companies must be where customers are—digital mediums—to market, sell and build loyalty, but tech companies aren’t the only ones depending on the internet to also deliver the goods. The transactional, purchasing phase of the customer’s journey now occurs digitally even in industries that existed before the internet, like entertainment. People watch live events, follow their favorite TV shows and hear the newest songs not only on televisions and radios but also on web portals and mobile apps.

That’s a huge, expanding responsibility for IT. The shift also presents opportunities for CIOs to prove and add value to their company’s top line. Corporate websites, microsites and mobile apps are often customers’ first or final impression of a brand, as well as tools for acquiring heaps of valuable customer data.

To guarantee availability and improve the performance of these key digital destinations, many CIOs turn to the cloud.

 

Common Cloud Use Cases: Website Availability

Websites, and all the supporting applications, are often one of the first use cases companies try out for cloud computing. Years ago, it was reported that so many websites already depended on Amazon’s cloud that the company could be considered “a core piece of the internet.”

After all, the benefits of cloud computing lend quite well to the needs of websites, such as:

  • High Availability & Disaster Recovery:Failure is not an option when it comes to website availability. Leading cloud providers offer and manage configurations that ensure the servers running websites never quit and are always up-to-date.
  • Scalability:The sharp fluctuations in traffic that websites experience can impact performance and availability. IT can access on-demand resources from the cloud to keep sites afloat during unexpected peak traffic.
  • Developer Enablement:IT can’t just run websites. They also need to build new features that keep up with customer preferences. Developers can easily replicate web environments in the cloud for testing, collaboration and rollout.

The following story further illustrates the benefits of cloud computing for one of companies’ arguably most important assets: customer-facing digital platforms.

 

Server Not Found

“For us, that’s the worst-case scenario,” said Roger Hofmann, head of digital for HIT RADIO FFH, a German radio station expecting on average 6 million monthly visitors to several web portals. “Every time our website was down in the past, there was a huge danger that our audience would go to the competitor’s radio station and get the information there.”

HIT RADIO FFH operated websites on-premises with some additional cloud resources, but IT couldn’t quickly get the additional resources they needed to handle peak website traffic. “In extreme weather situations or when competitions run, up to 100 times the number of users access our website and app. It was sometimes difficult to absorb these peak loads flexibly with our previous infrastructure,” said Hofmann.

So IT expanded to a software-defined data center (SDDC) managed entirely by a new cloud provider in the private cloud. That move, completed within just two months without any outages, empowered IT to scale up from two to 25 virtual machines andscale up or down again in the event of planned or unplanned events. With that newfound flexibility to get resources on demand, Hofmann said they ensure their audience can always reach HIT RADIO FFH.

 

Reaching Farther from the Cloud

From the cloud, HIT RADIO FFH doesn’t just make their websites available to regular visitors. IT also has part of a digital foundation from which to create better, more exciting digital experiences for their growing audience.

Hofmann and his colleague Thomas Winkelmann, a web developer, said they’re more easily setting up test environments to develop new features, like radio streaming. Virtualization and cloud technologies simplify monitoring and maintenance, so IT can also focus on improving the performance of multimedia-heavy web portals and mobile apps—a key digital medium to compete in for the foreseeable future.

“The fact that our listeners can access our offering at any time from any location—and not quickly click to a rival station—is of clear competitive advantage to us,” said Winkelmann. “We continue to pursue a clear strategy of mobile first.”

 

Sources: VMware/Radius

Need cloud computing? Do not hesitate to contact us at sales@zettagrid.id or call to +62 811 28 38 78

Next Major Cloud Markets Could Be Least Expected

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As organizations in developing countries leapfrog to advanced technologies, conditions are ripening for nascent markets to surge ahead with the cloud.

Today’s developing countries might surprise outsiders. Swiftly modernizing under the radar, developing countries do not look so technologically different from their more developed neighbors.

These areas are a greenfield, allowing businesses I work with there to hop straight into cloud environments. Faced with sudden, heightened connectivity, many developing countries readily challenge the status quo with more advanced digital technologies and behaviors. This is not unlike the trajectory of more mature markets, except for the rapid rate at which this digital transformation occurs.

 

Untapped Markets Tap into Cloud Computing

Developing countries are untapped markets and opportunities for businesses to be among the first to meet the burgeoning demands of a rising economic class. To fulfill a developing country’s unique needs, though, businesses must be able to deliver new, tailored solutions on largely untested grounds.

Cloud technologies are ideal for these businesses. It includes all the ingredients needed to accelerate innovation in volatile markets: agility, flexibility, reliability, scalability, and affordability.

With multiple clouds, in particular, companies can choose the best combination of cloud technologies to scale at low costs, while complying with data privacy and government regulations. With little or no legacy systems, businesses can skip the complicated migration process and smoothly transition to manage multi-cloud environments.

Though developing countries still lack some resources to support cloud infrastructures, like expansive networks and effective power grids, I see it coming. Consider Bangladesh and Pakistan (two emerging markets in Asia my team and I know well).

Construction on a Tier 4 data center in Bangladesh, projected to be one of the largest in the world, is already underway to support cloud computing in the region. Pakistan established its first cloud-based data center in 2016, no more than a month after the country’s largest telecommunications provider partnered with IBM on a public cloud. Today, Pakistan is setting up a government public cloud (G-cloud) thanks to the ongoing partnership between the country’s National Telecommunication Corporation (NTC) and VMware.

 

Digital Transformation Is Faster and Further Than Expected

Organizations in nascent markets may be playing catchup to what those in more developed markets have already done, but less-developed markets have the luxury of skipping ahead instead of repeating the same evolutionary process. Many of the companies I work with in these countries plan to go full steam ahead with advanced technologies from day one—solutions that many well-established companies in more developed markets still lack.

That means business leaders can leapfrog traditional data centers and start from the ground up in the cloud—or often in multiple clouds.

Government support is further ushering along digital transformation in developing countries. Working toward Pakistan’s Vision 2025 priorities (include modernizing infrastructure and strengthening regional connectivity), NTC initially partnered with VMware last year to modernize the organization’s IT infrastructure and accelerate network expansion.

 

Sudden Connectivity Challenges the Status Quo

Mobile devices and the internet are still new technologies in developing countries, but that all changes when income levels rise, the cost of the technologies falls, and networks expand. It would not surprise me to see highways of connectivity arrive in the world’s most remote regions before roads or railways.

The economies of Bangladesh and Pakistan grew 7.1 and 5.3 percent, respectively, in 2017, surpassing worldwide economic growth at less than 4 percent. The countries’ populations—among the 10 largest in the world—are expected to drive notable growth of the world’s total mobile subscribers in the next seven years, with their own mobile penetration (unique mobile subscribers as a percentage of the population) jumping to 60 and 50 percent, respectively, by 2025.

Because of this heightened mobile connectivity, residents in these remote areas can open a bank account in areas where physical branches do not exist or connect with doctors where healthcare systems do not reach. People there grow accustomed to using mobile devices and the internet in their daily lives, and eventually, they expect the same mobile connectivity in their professional lives.

On the ground, I’m seeing similar expectations forming in developing countries for fast, reliable, highly available cloud connectivity.

 

Sources: VMware/Radius

Need cloud computing? Do not hesitate to contact us at sales@zettagrid.id or call to +62 811 28 38 78