Nutanix AHV DRaaS

Service Overview

Nutanix DRaaS is a Nutanix-powered platform that allows clients to recover their Nutanix hosted workloads on dedicated, enterprise-class hardware in the event of a disaster without the burden of maintaining the infrastructure. Expedient maintains the hardware platform, software updates, licensing, and ongoing maintenance as a managed service. Clients have full admin access to their virtual machines, along with the ability to perform many of the same operations as their on-premises Nutanix environment.

Service Features

• Dedicated hardware platform per client 

• Supports Nutanix AHV

• Pay per host for resources + per VM for fully managed disaster recovery

• Encryption-at-rest and in-flight

• Protection groups for grouping applications

• 24x7x365 support for declaring disasters and initiating failovers

• Software defined networking allows clients to allocate preferred private IP networks

• Prism Central access to manage multiple clusters and locations

• REST API and CLI for management access and automation

• Native replication and disaster recovery using Nutanix Disaster Recovery

  • From on-premises Nutanix clusters to Expedient Nutanix Private Cloud

  • From Expedient Nutanix Private Cloud to on-premises Nutanix clusters

• Two-factor authentication

• Multiple RPO options available

  • 15 minute RPO (NearSync)

  • 1 Hour RPO (Async)

Default Deployment Settings

• Available in Milwaukee and Denver

• Two options

  • Private Cloud

    • Client is responsible for disaster recovery setup (replication, protection groups, etc)

    • Expedient will manage and maintain hardware, hypervisor, and Prism Central

  • Fully managed disaster recovery

    • Expedient will assist with disaster recovery setup including configuring replication, setting up protection policies, and recovery plans.

    • Expedient will manage and maintain hardware, hypervisor, and Prism Central

    • Expedient will monitor replication jobs and alert clients via SMC ticket on issues

• Client private networking will be configured on the Expedient platform

• External networking will be configured to client tenants through a firewall

• Workload protection will be configured with the client's input

• Networking will be configured for failover between Expedient locations

• Client will be provided a "test bubble" network for testing

  • This is to prevent IP conflicts with production during testing

  • This also prevents application, data, and IT service conflicts with production during testing validation

• Clients will be given access and authenticate to Prism Central

  • Clients can also contact the OSC to initiate a test failover or declare an actual disaster

• Clients are provided a Disaster Recovery runbook outlining the steps to execute a failover operation to be incorporated with a larger DR or Business Continuity plan

• Clients that declare a disaster or commit to a failover operation, will be asked to reside in secondary site for a period of time for reverse replication to complete successfully, typically 24- 48 hours depending on the size and change rate of the environment.

• Data protection and monitoring services will be reestablished after a failover AND commit to the secondary site longer than 48hr timeframe.

• Clients may request a DR test during the implementation or elect to postpone

  1. Postponing a DR test, exempts any credit requests during a disaster or future test.

  2. A test plan will be requested from the client to validate a successful test, include infrastructure, application and/or end user acceptance criteria

• Client user directory (i.e. Active Directory) will be configured for authentication

Use Cases

• IT disaster recovery

• Virtual Machine recoveries

  • On-premises virtual machines

  • Expedient virtual machines

• Operating system recoveries

  • Windows

  • Linux

• Database recoveries

  • Microsoft SQL

  • Oracle

• Mission critical application recoveries

• Tier 1/2/3 application recoveries

Client Experience Expectations

Clients will connect their on-premises clusters to Expedient via VPN, which will provide the path for replication to the Nutanix cluster on the Expedient side. Clients will use login through OneLogin to Prism Central to access the platform, view replication status, and run recovery runbooks to test and execute a workload failover.

Expedient will monitor replication jobs, availability of the platform, hardware status, resource utilization through Prism Central metrics and alert the client via SMC ticket.

Expedient will support failover from on-premises clusters to Expedient clusters and can perform the failover for a client on their behalf. Expedient will troubleshoot failovers and ensure the recovery completes successfully.

Recovery Workflows

There are multiple options clients can use to perform a disaster recovery of your workloads.

1. Clients can perform their own recoveries by following this procedure: (link to future KB article)

2. Clients can contact Expedient's Operations Support Center and Expedient can perform the failover on the client's behalf.

Responsibility and Accountability Matrix

Supported Platforms