Powered by Zerto leading technology, with Disaster Recovery as a Service from Leaseweb our customers can be ensured that their business continues in case of interruptions (downtime) or disasters caused by human errors or disasters (eg: ransomware attacks, datacenter outage). This solution is offered under OPEX models and it is integrated within our VMware stack for both Single and Multitenant clouds.  Leaseweb maintains the replication software by monitoring, patching and updating all components so it is up and running on 24x7 basis for you.

How does it work?

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is an almost-syncrhonus replication system working at hypervisor level, used for protecting applications and data from disruption caused by disaster. That means you don't need to install anything in your virtual machines and the computing resources required are not consumed from your valuable resource pools. The replication platform is managed by Leaseweb, while you retain control on the replication and orchestration processes. 

Through the Zerto management console, hosted in Leaseweb platforms, you can:

• check the status with a management dashboard with the replication perfomance, eg: RTO, RPO, locations, virtual machines being protected, alarms, etc.
• Choose what virtual machines require replication through Virtual Protection Groups (VPG).
• Create and decide on what checkpoint you want to recover your data
• Declare disaster recovery 
• Test your disaster recovery setup
• Define network setup on your secondary site
• Define the journal disk for additional checkpoints

Leaseweb VMware Private Cloud (Single-Tenant)

The single tenant private cloud platform, based on vSphere, is connected to another Private cloud in a secondary independant Leaseweb datacenter. Thus, Zerto replicates the workloads between both dedicated platforms though private communications, ensuring high performance and privacy. 

Source: Zerto

Leaseweb VMware Cloud Director (Multi-Tenant)

For VMware Cloud Director (Multi-Tenant) users who are in need of a Disaster Recovery solution, the solution is deployed between our Cloud Director platforms on different datacenters. As a customer, you can consume resources pools of both datacenters to run your primary workloads and protect them on the secondary/DR location. 

Log-in to management portal of a site

With the delivery of your services you received two URLs to the management portals. One portal is connected to your main site (A) and the second portal is connected to DR site (B). 

Protect your workloads

Create a Virtual Protection Group (VPG)

Create a new Virtual Protection Group (VPG) to configure which VM you want to have replicated to the other side. You can replicate from site A to B (by logging into the management portal of site A) or from site B to A (by logging into the management portal of site B). You can configure a VPG as follows:

Click New VPG on the top right menu. Enter a name and select VMs you want to protect.

Select the site, resource pool and datastore to replicate to:

Click Advanced Configuration and then Retention Policy. Make sure to disable Long Term Retention as this is currently not supported. 

You have now configure a VPG and you virtual machines are automatically being replicated to the secondary site. In the VPG list you can see that status of the replication and the current RTO.

Test failover

After setting up a protection group and having the VPG continuously synchronizing your virtual machine(s), you can perform a test failover. Make sure the button is set Test and click Failover on the bottom-right to start the test.

Select which VPG you want to test.

Select which virtual machine(s) you want to fail over in the test.

Click on Start failover test to fail over the selected virtual machines to the second site. A task is started. You can keep track of the status by clicking on the VPG to view the VPG overview page.

Log into the the vCenter of the second site. You should see the selected virtual machine(s) running. The virtual machine names will have the suffix "testing recovery". You can verify if everything is working as expected.

After completing your checks, you can stop the failover test in the Zerto management portal by clicking Stop on the VPG page.
 

Real failover

For a real failover, you perform the same steps as when testing the a failover (see above). However, you need to switch to Live before clicking Failover.