Replication for Amazon EC2

To take advantage of the most recent features in replication, use the Command Center to configure and run replication operations. For more information, see Disaster Recovery and Replication.

The replication feature enables incremental replication from a backup of a VMware virtual machine (source VM) to a synced instance in the Amazon EC2 (destination). This feature enables the Amazon site to serve as a disaster recovery (DR) site.

You can configure replication to initiate replication automatically after backups or on a scheduled basis (for example, daily or once a week), without requiring any additional action from users. Using backup data for replications minimizes the impact on the production workload by avoiding the need to read the source VM again for replication.

Disaster Recovery

Replication can be used to create and maintain warm recovery sites for virtual machines running critical business applications. Replication offers the following benefits:

• The impact on production servers is minimized because replication uses backup data to create replicated virtual machines; backup captures virtual machine data in a single pass, and replication runs on backup infrastructure.

• Replication is hardware agnostic. There is no need to reproduce the original hardware environment at the recovery site.

• The recovery time objective (RTO), the time interval between a service interruption and the restoration of services from the recovery site, is the time needed to power on the virtual machines at the recovery site. Automated validation and the ability to specify new network connections at the recovery site ensure that the startup time is minimized.

• The recovery point objective (RPO), the acceptable time interval within which virtual machine data must be recoverable, is determined by the frequency of backups.

• You can configure an auxiliary copy operation to copy backup data to a remote location where replication operations are performed. Deduplication and compression reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred over the wide area network (WAN).

• Orchestration features support continuity of operations:

  • Planned failover to validate the DR site or perform maintenance on the primary site

  • Unplanned failover for quick site recovery

  • Failback to move operations back to the primary site

Related Topics

You can replicate Amazon EBS volume snapshots from one AWS region to another as described in Replicating Snapshots with IntelliSnap for Amazon. Snapshot replication does not support the DR orchestration features that are included with replication.