Abiquo DRaaS

Abiquo with Zerto Disaster Recovery enables you to configure DRaaS in your multi-cloud platform so users can easily protect their VMs in private cloud datacenters with VMware vCenter

Introduction to DRaaS

The DRaaS feature uses Zerto to enable you to offer self-service disaster recovery on demand. This will enable users to supplement their on-demand backups, as part of a fully protected multi-cloud platform. When users protect VMs, Abiquo creates virtual protection groups (per virtual appliance) and manages VM protection.

Contact Abiquo Customer Service to obtain your separate license for the DRaaS feature with the Zerto plugin.

In Abiquo 5.2, you can configure DRaaS for private cloud environments with Zerto and VMware vCenter. Abiquo supports a Zerto environment where you can protect a datacenter and fail over to a recovery datacenter. See Abiquo and Zerto test environment.

To work with Zerto failover in Abiquo, you must configure the Zerto plugin in the Abiquo platform using Abiquo Configuration Properties#zerto.

To register your Zerto system in Abiquo, create Protection managers.

To control access to this feature, there are two new privileges, and by default only the Cloud administrator role has these privileges.

Privileges: View and manage protection managers, Manage VM disaster recovery protection

Dashboards

The Abiquo dashboard displays the number of VMs the tenant has protected with disaster recovery. For more details, see Configure dashboard display

As usual administrators can set limits for the DRaaS feature. In this case they can set limits at the tenant, tenant in datacenter, and VDC levels on the number of VMs that users can protect with disaster recovery as a service. See Manage Enterprises#Setallocationlimitsforanenterprisetocontrolresourceusage

And of course, you can set prices for VM disaster recovery protection with DRaaS. See Pricing View

The platform will include the new DR protected VM attribute in your accounting data and in the pricing estimates for deploying VMs.

DRaaS in infrastructure

To start working with the DRaaS feature, in the Infrastructure view, you can define the Protection managers. For each protection manager, you will also need a recovery protection manager.

It is easy to configure Abiquo to use a standard DRaaS configuration of Zerto Protection Managers for vCenter. See Protection managers

When a VM fails over, it should be replicated from the production vCenter to the recovery vCenter in the recovery datacenter.

Each protection manager works with a single vCenter and each Abiquo virtual datacenter works with a single vCenter. This means that administrators do not need to link protection managers with virtual datacenters in Abiquo. Each protection manager can cover the group of Abiquo virtual datacenters with VMs in the same vCenter. For configuration reasons, the administrator should assign Available datacenters. The platform will use the NARS remote service from an available datacenter to manage Zerto.

You can later edit the protection manager if you need to make changes.

After you configure DRaaS, when you onboard a VM that is protected by Zerto, the platform will detect that it is DR protected.

Tenant networks

In the recovery vCenter, the administrator should create a network for each tenant to use for recovery and failover testing. When the user protects a VM, the platform will search for the tenant's recovery network by name to add it to the Zerto virtual protection group.

To define the recovery networks for multiple tenants, the administrator should create a base name and register it in the abiquo.properties file. Then for each tenant the administrator should define a DR-code.

For example, the default network base name is "Draasnet".

And if you had three enterprises called "Enterprise1", "Enterprise2", "Enterprise 3", you could use the DR-codes of "Ent1", "Ent2", and "Ent3".

The network administrator should create networks with the same base name plus the DR-code tenant suffix for each tenant.

So in our example, we would create three networks called: "DraasnetEnt1", "DraasnetEnt2", and "DraasnetEnt3".

The administrator should then edit each Abiquo enterprise and add an enterprise property with the key "DR-code" and the value of the tenant's network suffix.

In this case, for "Enterprise1" it would be "Ent1", and so on.

See Manage Enterprises#Entertenantdetailsandmetadata

In order to onboard recovered VMs, you can define the recovery networks in the recovery datacenter in Abiquo. To capture a VM, you will need to know the network tag of the network that it is in.

The easiest networking option is to create an external network as the recovery network for each enterprise. When you create the external network in the platform, enter the network tag.

See Create an external network for cross-platform networking.

If you wish to use private networks, it may be possible to define a recovery virtual datacenter for each virtual datacenter and deploy a VM on a custom private network with an appropriate name.

In any case, you should check the Zerto configuration for networks and network tags, and determine how best to configure the recovery networks for your environment.

Cloud users protect VMs with the disaster recovery service

In the cloud, on the VM control panel, there is a new button to Enable DR protection or Disable DR protection for a deployed VM.

To protect a deployed VM with the disaster recovery service, the user just clicks the shield DR protect button.

Behind the scenes, the platform creates Zerto Protection Groups. The Zerto Protection Group are transparent to the Abiquo user and initially, Abiquo creates one Protection Group for the VMs in each Abiquo virtual appliance. Abiquo does not make changes to protection groups and the user cannot move a DR protected VM to another Virtual appliance. If a protection group already exists, the administrator may need to delete it directly in Zerto to enable the user to protect the VM.

On the VM icon, if the VM is protected, the DRaaS shield symbol is drawn with a darker line.

Failover and failover testing

In this version, you should use Zerto directly to perform all failover tests and Zerto will perform failovers. After a failover, you can capture the VM into Abiquo in the recovery datacenter. See Import and Capture Virtual Machines.

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