The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/230349
case studies Again, the key component of this was that the administrator did "nothing" in the recovery process. The administrator requested a migration or a test, and we facilitated it. Once the workloads were powered up and operating at the alternate site, they were already pingable, and the administrator connected remotely to their VMs and started their own verification process. This required no IP change, no scripts, no logging into SANs for promoting replicas or tape restores of data. There is no need to manage two operating systems for only one function, which otherwise would double our attack surface and further strain limited administrator hours. Describing and demonstrating such a simple result led to much discussion among administrators. How could we only have due to production traffic, gracefully. Its monitoring capabilities extend to vCenter and the SAN operating system, so its alerts are meaningful and do not require constant attention to guarantee the quality of the replication. Site Recovery Manager from VMware has integrated the RecoverPoint replication, creating the ability to designate VMs and operating systems to be mirrored for recovery at an alternate site. We currently have over 90 VMs that are protected in this way. Each group of VMs is capable of not only being recovered in a catastrophic loss of a site, but they can be tested for recovery. Even more important, we can migrate these groups just to balance loads across sites if we choose. All this occurs in minutes. We have failed over some groups in as little as seven minutes for five nodes (more complex 24-node groups took around one hour). No Interruptions! The implementation of Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV) using Cisco Nexus 7000 switches in two data centers facilitates the creation of a Layer 2 VLAN spanning multiple sites in a Layer 3 network. Coarse wavelength division multiplexing (CWDM) is used across a highly available dark fiber connection linking the data centers. CWDM allows the dark fiber circuit to be divided into multiple channels which can transmit different types of data and allow access to more bandwidth. Dark fiber is not a requirement for OTV or VMware Site Recovery Manager. The same process could be achieved using any Layer 3 network with sufficient bandwidth to support the storage migration. The Cisco Nexus 7000 also provides virtual device context functionality. This allows the switches to be virtualized at the device level. Logical segmentation is then possible between the overlay network and data VLANs (which is a requirement for OTV). The OTV virtual data center then has a number of physical ports assigned to it in a Layer 2 trunk. VMware Site Recovery Manager orchestrates the failover process and issues commands to VMware, EMC RecoverPoint and the storage arrays to migrate servers and their storage from one data center to another. OTV allows those servers to appear in their new physical location without a change of IP address, DNS name or application configuration. The server is then visible to the wide area network using BGP. Server admins, application owners and end users no longer need to know their application has moved. It just works! This below diagram illustrates the OTV implementation at KWM: PE1 PE2 ULT-WAN01 WAN PE1 ULT-WAN02 NTR-WAN01 AS 65500 SVI-VDC AS 65500 L2 Trunk 4X1 GB E1/35 E10/35 ----------------------------------E1/36 E10/36 ----------------------------------E1/47 E10/47 ----------------------------------E1/48 E10/48 ----------------------------------- NEXUS01 Extended VLAN VLAN 221 36 Peer to Peer OTV-VDC OTV-VDC Overlay Network OSPF Area 0 INTERFACE OVERLAY 1 description GS otv join-interface port-channel 15 otv control-group 239.1.1.88 otv data-group 232.1.1.0/28 otv extend-vlan 77, 78, 221 no shutdown L3 CDWM 4x1 GB All L2 Extended VLANs to exist on both switches INTERFACE OVERLAY 2 description Fuji otv join-interface port-channel 15 otv control-group 239.1.1.88 otv data-group 232.1.1.0/28 otv extend-vlan 77, 78, 221 no shutdown L2 Trunk 4X1 GB SVI-VDC E1/35 E10/35 ----------------------------------E1/36 E10/36 ----------------------------------E1/47 E10/47 ----------------------------------E1/48 E10/48 ----------------------------------- NEXUS02 Extended VLAN VLAN 221