customer story blog - vmware and DraaS

Customer Story: Managed VMware Cloud & Disaster Recovery

Team Performive
by Team Performive on

THE BACKGROUND

The client’s workloads were running in a VMware-based virtual private cloud with connections to physical databases. The path ahead looked clear for the client until two of their disks failed and they lost all their production data. This was due to a legacy storage array that was not configured optimally for a managed service environment. As a result of the business-impacting disk failure, the client’s Board of Directors mandated that they move their environment “to the cloud.” Settling on a single region/zone environment with Microsoft Azure, the client began the process of installing Azure migration tools to transfer their environment.

The Performive team became aware of the client’s planned exit and began building a team strategy to win them back. The Performive engineering team worked to create a solution that would fully virtualize their environment giving them a fully software-defined data center environment. The proposal would implement the board’s directive, solve the disk issue the client experienced, and be price-completive with their planned Azure environment.

THE PERFORMIVE SOLUTION

Performive presented the client with a multi-region/multi-zone (Los Angeles and Atlanta) Managed VMware Cloud with DR solution. The new solution would fully virtualize their environment (including their physical databases) to give them a fully software-defined data center. The TCO was comparable to the single-zone Azure environment yet offered multiple regions. With a multi-zone environment being key for business continuity and providing always-on solutions to the client’s customers, Performive won back AMT as a customer.

The Performive and the client teams continued to partner together to optimize their hybrid architecture. AMT’s backups have been migrated to Performive’s reliable partner, Veeam. In the event of another outage, they will utilize Veeam Cloud Connect to sync critical data to a third, geographically diverse site. At this site, two VMs are continuously replicating the required services that the client’s 20 other VMs depend on. This will lower RPO from an hour to less than 5 minutes, which will minimize data loss to virtually nothing. It will also keep costs lean by operating only two of the 22 VMs constantly, avoiding the expense of active DRaaS.

In addition, the client utilizes VCD to view both their Los Angeles and Atlanta environments in a single-pane-of-glass, complete self-service tasks, and even initiate failover in the event of a disaster. The Performive team works with the client in regularly-scheduled environment review calls to continually modernize their infrastructure, focusing on availability, additional VMware features, and cost optimization. Currently, Performive and the client’s team are working on a project to install anycast load balancing and strengthen network connections between their environments in Los Angeles and Atlanta, which will give them the flexibility to run workloads on production servers in both locations.

Reference Architecture

VMware Cloud Reference Architecture