Background
It’s been just over six months since VMware Live Recovery was announced. This is an umbrella product name for VMware Live Site Recovery (formerly known as Site Recovery Manager) and VMware Live Cyber Recovery (formerly known as VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery and Ransomware Recovery). Like many of the changes at VMware this year, this is a move designed to streamline the disaster recovery solutions being made available for VMware Cloud Foundation, and to make it simpler for you to choose which product works best for you.
To that end, I’ve put together a series of links from the documentation that I’ve found useful when talking with customers about VMware Live Cyber Recovery in particular. I figured if my customers were asking about these things, someone else might find the answers useful too. This isn’t comprehensive, but hopefully it’s of some use.
Link-O-Rama
Maximum Configs
Here are the current configuration maximums for VMware Live Site Recovery, VMware Live Cyber Recovery, and local vSAN snapshots. Why would you need to know these? There are useful things to know that differentiate the products, such as the recovery point objective values, virtual machine limits, and so on. Remember, these should be treated as limits, not targets, and if you have an environment that exceeds these limits, reach out to your account team to talk about it.
Networking Considerations
- Does your security team want to know more about the Cyber Recovery (formerly DRaaS) connector? Check out this document.
- Can you use Direct Connect instead of clobbering my Internet feed? Yes, here’s how. Want to know more about AWS Direct Connect (useful if you’re new to AWS)? This article should help.
- What holes do you need to punch through my firewall for things like support and telemetry data uploads? This article on Service Public IP Addresses should help some.
- Can you throttle the bandwidth that the replication uses? Yes, you can. The documentation is here.
- Need to configure different IP addresses for your recovered virtual machines. This documentation should help.
How Do I Use It?
You can find (a slightly dated) copy of the VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery Admin Guide in PDF format here. Some things have changed with the switch to VMware Live Cyber Recovery, but the fundamentals remain the same, and it’s handy to have a downloadable copy of the admin guide, particularly when you’re in a situation where your data centre is on fire and your Internet connection is a melted mess.
Want to get a better feel for how VMware Live Cyber Recovery handles? Check out this Hands-on Lab.
Release Notes
The overall release notes for VMware Live Recovery are available here. You’ll see interesting bits of news, such as “VMware Cloud Director Availability is now part of VMware Live Recovery”. You can also drill down into the VMware Live Cyber Recovery documentation here, and the VMware Live Site Recovery 9.0 documentation can be found here. If you need to dig through some historical release notes (or just want to take a trip down memory lane), you can view the VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery release notes archive here.
But I Have More Questions
- There’s a great set of Frequently Asked Questions on VMware Live Recovery in PDF format that can be found here.
- How do you know if you need disaster recovery or ransomware recovery (or both)? This is a great article covering some of the considerations that you’ll need to think about.
- Are you looking at backup solutions for VMware Cloud on AWS? This is a comprehensive article on using third-party backup and recovery tools with VMware Cloud on AWS.
- Looking to leverage VMware Site Recovery on VMware Cloud on AWS? It has gone away, and you should consider moving to VMware Live Cyber Recovery.
- Wondering about the overall security of the VMware Live Cyber Recovery product? The Cloud Security Alliance performed a VCDR Assessment that you can access here.
Conclusion
And that’s about it. I’ve published a few posts on this weblog covering VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery in the past, and you can find them here. While some of the screens might look a little different now, the vibe remains unchanged. If you have questions that I haven’t answered here, feel free to reach out and I’ll see if I can help.














