As you’d expect, the NEW Veeam Backup & Replication v11 is jam-packed full of features to help you protect your data in new and innovative ways. One of the biggest features of Veeam Backup & Replication v11 is of course Continuous Data Protection, or Veeam CDP, for protecting those mission critical workloads with near-zero RPOs.
Today, Veeam Disaster Recovery Orchestrator v4 is now available, with full support for Veeam CDP Replicas, for turning up your DR strategy to, err 11. Some may be asking, “What is Veeam Disaster Recovery Orchestrator? I’ve never heard of this.” With V4, we have rebranded the Veeam Availability Orchestrator, including all of its features, to a name that is more descriptive and fitting for its serious capabilities in and around automating and orchestrating your DR plan.
Let’s take a closer look at how Orchestrator fits into your Veeam environment when it comes to CDP.
Veeam CDP Replica Plans
The biggest and most exciting feature of Orchestrator v4 is the introduction of Veeam CDP Replica orchestration plans. This allows Orchestrator to automate, verify and document the failover of Veeam CDP Replicas, giving you the lowest RPOs and RTOs around.
What makes CDP Replica Plans so special… besides its overall awesomeness?
Here are three of our favorite things.
Real-time recovery
With the addition of the Veeam CDP Replica Plan, Orchestrator is able to fail over your CDP replicas with one click and verify everything is working as expected.
With the addition of CDP Replica Plans, Orchestrator can directly orchestrate the failover of CDP Replicas, and validate and test your applications as the replicas come online. We’ve orchestrated recovery for business-critical apps with RPOs measured in seconds.
This type of validated and orchestrated recovery is nothing new, and Orchestrator can provide this for more than just CDP, of course.
Orchestrator provides this same functionality for regular Veeam replicas, Veeam backups, and storage snapshots (more on that later). Let’s get back to what makes Orchestrator v4 so special when it comes to Veeam CDP Replicas.
Enhanced Readiness Check
Orchestrator’s Readiness Check also got some major enhancements with this release, especially when it comes to Veeam CDP Replicas.
When your Readiness Check runs daily, you’ll get even more visibility into your disaster recovery environment, and if you’re ready to recover. By running this lightweight check daily, it’s easy to find issues in your recovery environment before they impact you.
In Orchestrator v4, you’ll also see information on your CDP Policy’s SLA.
Besides your RPO and SLA, which are some of the most important metrics when it comes to disaster recovery, a Readiness Check also looks at things like making sure the Veeam CDP Filter are installed on your vSphere hosts.
Best of all? This report can be automatically e-mailed to key stakeholders each day.
Tracking and auditing
Speaking of the Readiness Check, that’s just one of Orchestrators comprehensive, dynamically generated reports.
Another key document that Orchestrator takes care of for you is the Plan Definition Report, or simply put, your DR plan.
This plan details each step taken on the VMs that make up your orchestration plan, as well as anything else you may have Orchestrator doing for you, like running custom scripts before or after VMs are processed.
Besides the details you need, the Plan Definition report also has a detailed change log.
Once again, this plan can be updated daily and sent to key stakeholders, to find anything that may have changed in your environment and keep you in compliance.
Even more exhilarating features in Orchestrator v4
As if CDP Replica plans weren’t enough, there are even more exhilarating features coming to Orchestrator v4.
Orchestration Plans can now leverage Veeam Backup & Replication jobs, in addition to storage volumes and vSphere tags to add assets to plans. This provides even more flexibility when it comes to creating your disaster recovery plan.
Storage Orchestration Plan support has also been expanded, with support for Lenovo ThinkSeries DM storage systems.
Take action now
Are you ready to get serious about your DR strategy and automate your recovery plan for those critical VMs? Want to see what streamlining and orchestrating your disaster recovery looks like? We think you are!
If you’re already using Veeam Backup & Replication, upgrade to V11, then download the free trial of Veeam Disaster Recovery Orchestrator v4 at Veeam.com. Once you have it installed and configured, you’ll have your first DR plan created in less than ten minutes!