The VMware vCloud Availability for Cloud-to-Cloud DR solution extends existing hybrid cloud offerings of VMware Cloud Providers™ on top of VMware vCloud Director with disaster recovery and application continuity between vCloud Director Virtual Data Centers or Cloud Environments. vCloud Availability Cloud-to-Cloud brings in a much-needed in providing native Disaster Recovery between vCloud Director instances. VMware vCloud Availability for Cloud-to-Cloud DR can help VMware Cloud Providers enable further monetization of existing VMware vCloud Director multi-tenant cloud environments with DR services, including replication and failover capabilities for workloads at both VM and vApp level.

Features:

• vCloud Availability Cloud-to-Cloud DR has capability of each deployment to serve as both source and recovery sites. There are no dedicated source and destination sites. Same set of appliances works as Sources or Destination.
• Replication and recovery of vApps (VMs) between organization Virtual Data Centers (orgVDC) as well as two instances of vCloud Director for migration, DR, and planned migration.
• it offers complete self-serviceability for the provider and tenant administrator via a unified HTML5 portal that can be used alongside vCloud Director. Replication, migration, and failover can be managed completely by the tenant or provided as a managed service by the provider.
• Symmetrical replication flow that can be started from either the source or the recovery vCD instance.
• Built-in encryption or encryption and compression of replication traffic.
• Enhanced control with white-listing of DR-enabled vCloud Director organizations, enforcement of specific min Recovery Point Objective (RPO) at an organization (org) level, maximum snapshots per org and max replications per tenant.
• Provide Non-disruptive, on-demand disaster recovery testing.
• Policies that allow service provider administrators to control the following system attributes for one or multiple vCloud Director organizations:
  • Limit the number of replications at the vCloud Director organization level
  • Limit the minimum Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
  • Limit number of retained snapshots per VM replication
  • Limit the total number of VM replications

Use Cases:

Though the most obvious use case for VMware vCloud Availability Cloud-to-Cloud DR is disaster recovery from one cloud availability zone to another cloud availability zone, it can handle a number of different use cases and provide significant capability and flexibility to service providers. For all use cases and situations, VMware vCloud Availability Cloud-to-Cloud DR supports non-disruptive testing of protected cloud workload in network and storage isolated environments. This provides the ability to test disaster recovery, disaster avoidance, or planned migrations as frequently as desired to ensure confidence in the configuration and operation of recovery on cloud. The use cases are as below:

Migration:

A tenant or provider administrator can utilize C2C to migrate workloads from one organization VDC to another with minimal disruption from a self-service portal. End benefit is re-organizing workloads from an easy to use workflow.

• Easy to use workflow mechanism
• Organize workloads in different orgVDCs
• Ability to migrate between vCD instances or within the same vCD instance

Disaster Recovery:

A service provider has multiple sites with vCD based multi-tenant environment. Customer like to do DR from one cloud provider site to another cloud site. Disaster recovery or a planned/unplanned failover is what VMware vCloud Availability Cloud-to-Cloud DR was specifically designed to accomplish for cloud providers. This helps providers and customers to achieve:

• Fastest RTO
• Recover from unexpected failure
• Full or partial site recovery

Disaster Avoidance:

Preventive failover is another common use case for VMware vCloud Availability Cloud-to-Cloud DR. This can be anything from an oncoming storm to the threat of power issues.

VMware vCloud Availability Cloud-to-Cloud DR allows for the graceful shutdown of virtual machines at the protected site, full replication of data, and startup of virtual machines and applications at the recovery site ensuring app-consistency and zero data loss. Solution helps Providers and Customer in recovering from:

• Anticipate outages
• Preventive failover
• Graceful shutdown ensuring no data loss

Upgrade and Patch Testing:

The VMware vCloud Availability Cloud-to-Cloud DR test environment provides a perfect location for conducting operating system and application upgrade and patch testing. Test environments are complete copies of production environments configured in an isolated network segment which ensures that testing is as realistic as possible while at the same time not impacting production workloads or replication.

This will give you basic idea of what vCloud Availability Clout-to-Cloud DR solves for the providers.