Hello, I am interested to know what everyone is using to provide disaster recovery for VMs running in CloudStack?
Note, I am talking about true DR to another data center, not HA. I have seen the previous thread where someone asked about DR, but the answer provided only talked about HA of VMs within the same Cluster or Zone. This is not my question. I am looking for a method to maintain an up-to-date copy of a running VM, including its data, in another Zone or Region, such that if the first Zone is destroyed, the VM can be brought up in the other Zone and continue production. Before cloud, DR for virtualized environments was typically handled using SAN replication. The VMs would be quiesced and snapshotted at regular intervals (e.g. hourly), and the SAN LUNs would be continuously replicated asynchronously. Following this approach, if the primary site was destroyed, the SAN LUNs would be enabled for read-write at the secondary location, and the VMs could then be started there, using the last successful snapshot (the last consistency point). I have looked at what Amazon and Rackspace provide for their Clouds, and the approach seems to be user-initiated quiesced cloud snapshots, combined with Secondary Storage that is automatically replicated and available throughout their Clouds. Therefore, if the site where the VM is running gets destroyed, the latest VM snapshot can be deployed from Secondary Storage to any other Zone. I would like to know if anybody has experience/insights using this approach on CloudStack, particularly using XenServer hosts. Is there a mechanism available for end-users to create quiesced CloudStack snapshots of running production VMs, such that applications and filesystems are put into a consistent state prior to the snapshot being created? Also, can anybody offer insight into how to automatically or continuously replicate Secondary Storage across Zones or Regions, using NFS-based Secondary Storage (not object storage), such that CloudStack users will see any be able to deploy their Snapshots in any other Zone or Region? If what I am describing is not yet possible with CloudStack, I would be like to be pointed towards the part of the CloudStack roadmap that discusses the planned architecture. Thanks, JJ
