How to provide Site Failover protection using NAKIVO vSphere Replication and Site Recovery [Sponsored]

Nakivo Backup and Replication allows you to replicate Virtual Machines with a wide range of options. You can replicate between vCenters, clusters and so on. This blogpost provides a quick overview of the setup and configuration of a replication job.

To create a replication job, click Create and then click VMware vSphere replication job on the Dashboard:

My homelab contains a single vCenter Server called “vcenter”. One cluster is running three nested ESXi hosts and Cluster2 contains my physical homelab server that runs my entire nested homelab environment. For demonstration purposes, I’m going to replicate an Ubuntu VM called “app01” from my nested vSphere environment to my physical ESXi server.

NAKIVO allows me to choose the datastore and Virtual Machine folder for the replica VM:

The Network Mapping feature can be used to map different source port groups (networks) to destination portgroups. The “App” network is actually a segment in NSX-T and the Network Mapping feature allows me to connect the NIC of the replica VM to a regular port group on a Standard vSwitch:

The “App01” VM is configured with a static network configuration:

Because we are replicating the VM to another L3 network, we need to change the IP configuration of the VM. The Re-IP feature allows NAKIVO to programmatically change the IP configuration of the replica VM:

In order to change the configuration of the guest OS (Ubuntu), we need to provide credentials with the proper permissions to make the necessary changes:

We now need to provide the details for the schedule. For demonstration purposes, I’m simply creating an “on demand” job:

NAKIVO supports a wide range of retention options.

On the final screen of the wizard, we can set a number of additional options:

NAKIVO fully supports vSphere 7.x and the replication job creates the necessary snapshots. The progress can be watched both in the NAKIVO console and the vCenter console.

When the replicate job is finished, we see a new VM registered called “app01-replica”:

Now we can create a job to orchestrate the failover using the New Site Recovery Job Wizard:

I created a Site Recovery Job based on the replication job I created earlier:

NAKIVO Site Recovery supports a Production mode failover and a Testing mode failover. I testing mode, the source VM will not be shut down and the replica VM will be connected to a new temporary and isolated portgroup:

We can re-use the network remapping and Re-IP configuration from the replication job:

Now it’s time to test our Site Recovery job. Using “Run Job” we can choose between a Test Site Recovery Job and Run Site Recovery Job:

After the Test job starts, we can track the progress in the NAKIVO console:

In vCenter Server, we see the new portgroup for the test network is created:

If we choose to Run the Site Recovery Job, we can choose between Planned Failover and Emergency Failover. When using the Planned Failover, NAKIVO we do a final replication before shutting down the source VMs. An Emergency Failover initiates a failover immediately without any final replication. It also doesn’t try to shut down the source VM because the premise is the source VM is unreachable due to a disaster:

And that’s it! The replica VM is powered on, connected to the destination portgroup and the Re-IP option changes the IP configuration to re-enable connectivity on the new network!