Enterprise Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity Expertise

VMware's popular Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is an extension to VMware vCenter that allows you to orchestrate, automate and test a consistent process for restoring services rapidly after an outage. SRM provides centrally managed and automated disaster recovery, application mobility, plus non-disruptive site migration, failback and re-protect. SRM also allows non-disruptive testing for disaster recovery, upgrades and patches and can generate audit reports to confirm complete service restoration, validate SLAs and prove compliance.

Site Recovery Manager works natively with VMware vSphere Replication, can be used with third-party disaster recovery solutions from leading storage vendors like NetApp, and integrates with Microsoft software products for advanced, application-aware data protection. SRM's support for automated, single-click orchestration of failover and failback processes allows you to minimize Recovery Time Objective (RTO). SRM's support for array-based synchronous replication enables zero-data-loss Recovery Point Objective (RPO) at metro distances. Combined with VMware's NSX network virtualization platform, SRM can recover the entire logical network topology at the recovery site.

Progent can provide the support of a certified VMware VCDX consultant to help you plan, deploy, test and manage a disaster recovery solution based on VMware Site Recovery Manager and NSX. Progent's Microsoft-certified Windows Server 2019 integration experts and Windows Server 2016 consultants can help you set up SRM on Windows Server at the protected site and the recovery site and can also help you configure mission-critical applications by providing services such as Exchange Server 2019 planning and configuration consulting, Exchange Server 2016 migration, SQL Server 2019 migration consulting, SQL Server 2017 upgrade expertise, and SQL Server 2016 integration consulting. Progent's Cisco CCIE consultants can help you design and deploy a robust network infrastructure for Site Recovery Manager, and Progent can provide a NetApp-certified SAN storage expert to help you integrate a NetApp clustered storage solution with SRM.

Key Features of VMware Site Recovery Manager
VMware Site Recovery Manager servers and VMware vCenter servers, running at the protected and recovery sites in conjunction with VMware vSphere and hosted by Microsoft Windows Server, work together to ensure that recovery virtual machines (VMs) are immediately and transparently started up when protected VMs are shut down. The virtual machines at the recovery site use the data replicated from the protected site and are therefore able to continue providing the same services.

SRM's migration of data and services between the protected and recovery sites is controlled by a recovery plan, an automated runbook that defines the order in which VMs are shut down and started up, their allocated resource pools, and the networks the VMs can access. You can configure multiple recovery plans to orchestrate recovery scenarios for specific applications or to handle entire sites. You can centrally manage VMware SRM recovery plans via the vSphere Web Client.

In addition to providing a strong disaster recovery solution to protect against unplanned downtime, VMware SRM also allows non-disruptive execution of planned processes such as disaster avoidance in anticipation of a major storm, moving a datacenter to a new location, testing upgrades and patches, testing a recovery plan to demonstrate compliance, and failback/re-protect after a partial or complete site shutdown. If your protected and recovery sites have a high-bandwidth, low-latency connection within a metro area, you can use array-based storage and synchronous replication with zero data loss (RPO) and rapid recovery time (RTO).

Site Recovery Manager can be configured in a variety of topologies to support different failover scenarios. In an Active-Passive configuration, a production site runs applications and services and a fully-provisioned secondary site waits unused until it is needed for recovery. This traditional topology is quickly falling out of favor because of its low utilization of IT resources. In an Active-Active topology, less urgent workloads such as testing or development are run at the secondary site until the recovery plan calls for them to be shut down to make room for critical workloads following outage. This allows the recovery site to stay productive. In a Bi-directional deployment, production workloads can be run at two sites which Site Recovery Manager will use as mutual protection and recovery sites. If either sites fails, SRM will activate its workloads on the surviving site.

VMware Site Recovery Manager also supports stretched storage clusters that span protected and recovery sites. Stretched clusters allow you to migrate workloads between two geographically proximate sites to balance services without downtime. This combination of technologies delivers the disaster recovery orchestration, automation, and audit reporting capability of SRM plus the ability of stretched clusters to enable fully active datacenters with on-demand, non-disruptive workload balancing.

Additional topologies supported by VMware Site Recovery Manager include shared recovery, where multiple remote sites such as branch offices are protected by the same recovery site, and shared protection, where a single site fails over some applications and VMs to one recovery site and others to one or more other recovery sites. All of the various architectural alternatives for deploying a disaster recovery solution based on VMware SRM have inherent advantages and problems and range in complexity from simple to very challenging. Progent can provide the support of an VMware VCDX-certified expert who can clarify the issues, recommend a topology that fits your organization's technical requirements and IT budget, and provide as-needed guidance and support to help you implement and manage your disaster recovery solution.

Combining Site Recovery Manager and VMware NSX
Because the IP address of a running virtual machine cannot be altered without incurring some downtime, protected sites and recovery sites supported by VMware Site Recovery Manager must have L2 network connectivity to achieve the fastest possible failover time. One way to accomplish this is through VMware's NSX network virtualization platform. The network virtualization provided with VMware NSX makes it possible to preserve L2 and recover the entire logical network topology at the recovery site. NSX also supports APIs for automating recovery at the network layer to optimize RPO and RTO. By combining NSX with a disaster recovery solution based on VMware Site Recovery Manager, you can streamline the recovery of critical networking services at the secondary site including logical switches, distributed logical routers, and distributed firewall (DFW) policies.

For seamless spanning of network and security policies across multiple sites you can use an external replication/synchronization technology like vRO (vRealize Orchestrator, formerly called vCenter Orchestrator), or you can use the Cross-VC feature of VMware NSX. Cross vCenter NSX simplifies the process of deploying Universal Logical Switches, Universal Distributed Logical Router, and Universal Distributed Firewall to create a single unified logical network (L2, L3, DFW) across the protected and recovery site. This permits rapid failover and recovery without requiring you to re-create the network on the recovery site or manually map and remap IP addresses.

Progent can provide the services of a VMware-certified NSX expert to help you integrate VMware Site Recovery Manager with VMware NSX and to configure a disaster recovery solution automated by vRO or Cross vCenter NSX.

How Progent Can Help You with VMware Site Recovery Manager
Progent can provide online or onsite access to a VMware VCDX-certified subject matter expert with world-class knowledge and experience deploying and configuring VMware Site Recovery Manager and VMware's NSX network virtualization platform for disaster recovery and business continuity. Progent offers expert understanding of VMware vCloud Director (vCD), VMware vRealize Automation (vRA), vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) and vCloud Suite used for managing private and hybrid cloud environments that feature high availability, fault tolerance, and application continuity. Progent has expertise with VMware vSAN native-vSphere storage, EMC VNX and VMAX storage systems, Dell EqualLogic storage arrays, NetApp's SAN storage product family, plus storage solutions from Pure Storage and Tintri. Progent also offers advanced consulting for underlying storage technologies including RAID, JBOD, ZFS, VMFS, Fibre Channel (FC), NFS, and iSCSI plus key network technologies including TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, LACP, OSPF, and BGP.

Progent's VCDX-certified VMware Site Recovery Manager and NSX subject matter expert has worked with datacenter architects, network engineers and department directors of some of the world's largest technology companies, major financial institutions, and government agencies to design solutions to improve disaster recovery RPO and RTO. Experience with large-scale projects includes working in environments scaling above 1500 ESXi hosts and 45,000 virtual machines.

Additional High Availability Technologies Offered by Progent's Experts
Progent's certified engineers can help your company to create a sensible, high-availability environment that addresses critical problems covering a broad array of networking technologies and operations such as:

Workplace Recovery Planning
Progent's disaster recovery planning engineers can help you design a business continuity strategy in order to resume network functionality in the event of an IT network disaster. Progent can help you to define a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy that incorporates scheduled disaster recovery evaluations and drills. Progent's Microsoft and Cisco-certified professionals can also help you create an affordable, non-stop system architecture that takes into account availability issues involving a wide array of network technologies and procedures. To find out more, see Business Continuity Consulting Services.

Fully Managed Cloud Backup: ProSight Data Protection Services
ProSight Data Protection Services offer small and mid-sized organizations a low cost end-to-end service for reliable backup/disaster recovery. For a low monthly price, ProSight DPS automates your backup processes and enables fast restoration of critical data, apps and virtual machines that have become lost or corrupted due to hardware breakdowns, software glitches, natural disasters, human error, or malware attacks like ransomware. ProSight DPS can help you back up, recover and restore files, folders, applications, system images, as well as Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware virtual machine images. Critical data can be backed up on the cloud, to a local device, or to both. Progent's backup and recovery consultants can deliver advanced expertise to configure ProSight Data Protection Services to to comply with regulatory requirements like HIPAA, FIRPA, PCI and Safe Harbor and, when needed, can assist you to recover your critical data. Learn more about ProSight DPS Managed Cloud Backup.

Microsoft Server 2016 Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Progent's Windows Server 2016 disaster recovery consultants can assist you to design a disaster recovery system built around Microsoft's cloud-tested Failover Clustering technologies including Cluster OS Rolling Upgrade for non-disruptive migration to Windows Server 2016, Storage Replica for zero-data-loss Recovery Point Objective (RPO), Storage Spaces Direct for enterprise-class storage clusters using commodity equipment, Virtual Machine Load Balancing for enhancing the performance and fault-tolerance of Failover Clusters while minimizing TCO and management overhead, and Cloud Witness for fast, economical creation of a stretch cluster quorum arbitration point. For more information, visit Microsoft Server 2016 Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Expertise.

Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Failover Clustering
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 introduced world-class availability and recoverability to Microsoft's failover clustering solution. Windows Server 2012 R2 adds to this foundation and delivers significant enhancements that offer increased expandability, non-stop disk storage availability for server applications, streamlined administration, quicker failover, and additional options for designing clusters. For more information, visit Windows Server 2012 Clustering Integration.

NetApp MetroCluster Disaster Recovery Software
NetApp MetroCluster is a disaster recovery platform that combines array-based storage clustering along with replication to deliver rapid, zero data loss disaster recovery (DR) between sites located as far as 185 miles (300km) apart from each other. Progent offers online or on-premises access to a NetApp MetroCluster consultant who can help you to design, configure, administer, upgrade, test and troubleshoot a disaster recovery system based on NetApp MetroCluster. Progent can assist you to choose an architecture for your MetroCluster deployment that aligns with your functional requirements and IT budget. Progent can make sure you adhere to leading practices for configuring your MetroCluster environment by delivering guidance with procedures such as assigning disk pools and shelf IDs, arranging aggregate and plexes layout, setting up NetApp FlexVol volumes, setting up NetApp Snapshot, installing switches, implementing a tiebreaker, designing a TCP/IP configuration replication network between your peered clusters, and verifying your DR system to show adherence with information assurance standards and regulatory mandates.

High Availability Load Balancing
Progent provides fault tolerant load balancing support covering system load balancing, load balanced applications, network backbone routing, and content dispatching technology such as F5 Networks 3DNS. Non-stop load balancing technologies for which Progent can provide consulting services include Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and 2008 Network Load Balancing Manager, Citrix Access Suite and Presentation Server, Cisco Content Services Switch, Cisco Distributed Director and LocalDirector 400 series, and F5 Networks 3-DNS. For details, visit High Availability Load Balancing.

Fault Tolerant Internet Data Centers
Progent's Data Center consultants can help you identify high availability data centers that match the particular requirements of your business. Fault tolerant collocation sites are especially appealing to small and mid-size organizations because of their affordability and simplified logistics compared to pursuing a do-it-yourself strategy. Trying to create an on-site data center that offers even a minimum degree of fault tolerance is financially prohibitive for the majority of small businesses. Progent is ready to show you how to get all the advantages of 24x7 colo sites by offering a full range of engineering and support services. To find out more, go to Non-stop Colocation Consulting.

Fault Tolerant Inter-office Connectivity
Progent’s multi-site connection consultants can help organizations create fault tolerant interoffice connectivity through redundant networks featuring transparent failover. Progent’s Cisco-certified CCIE network engineers can plan and deploy fault-tolerant Inter-office networks based on fault tolerant EIGRP network routers or zero-downtime OSPF deployment of Cisco routers. Progent can show you how multi-path connectivity and transparent fail-over can provide economical 24x7 interoffice connectivity. To find out more, see High-Availability Inter-office Networking.

Non-stop Internet Connections
Progent's Cisco-certified IT engineers can help you design an economical, high availability Internet configuration architecture that can deliver 24x7 Internet connectivity via a broad array of high availability Internet network technologies including fault tolerant BGP, automatic fail-over, and multiple Internet Service Providers. Progent can provide Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert consultants to help you utilize the most advanced technology for 24x7 Internet connections to implement an economical, fully redundant Internet network with automatic failover and other capabilities to create non-stop Internet connections. To learn more, go to High Availability Internet Connectivity Architecture.

Backup and Recovery Solutions Consultants
Progent can provide economical remote access to engineers skilled in a wide range of utilities and services that deliver solutions for protecting Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac, and Linux/UNIX physical and virtual servers and desktops plus laptops and handhelds. Progent offers consulting support for leading data protection products such as Acronis, Symantec Backup Exec, BackupAssist Software, HP Data Protector, Double-Take, MozyPro, Retrospect for Macintosh, Apple Time Machine, VMware vSphere Data Protection (VDP), and FLARs. Progent can assist your company to design, enhance, or maintain data backup systems for a range of architectures including local, remote, cloud-based, or hybrid. To read more, see Backup and Restore Solutions Consulting.

System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) Backup and Restore Consulting Experts
Progent's certified System Center Data Protection Manager support professionals can assist you to develop a practical disaster recovery plan, implement an affordable high-availability network infrastructure, configure a SCDPM-powered recovery solution, thoroughly test your system, train your administrative staff or regular consultants how to maintain Microsoft SCDPM, or provide extensive information technology outsourcing such as off-site hosting of Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager machines in Progent's world-class data center facility. To read more, go to System Center Data Protection Manager Expertise.

Barracuda Backup On-premises and Cloud Data Backup and Disaster Recovery
Barracuda Backup is an affordable, subscription-based backup and disaster recovery service for small and medium-size organizations. A Barracuda Backup solution can incorporate a custom-designed hardware storage device built by Barracuda or a virtual appliance with similar features but which uses your own storage hardware. Barracuda Backup protects vital business data produced on-premises, at one or multiple remote locations, or in the cloud. For disaster protection, you can replicate data to the Barracuda Cloud, to Amazon Web Services (AWS), or to any location with a physical or virtual Barracuda appliance. Progent is a Barracuda partner and Progent's Barracuda Backup consultants can provide a wide range of consulting support services to assist you to design, integrate, manage and repair a backup and disaster recovery system built on Barracuda Backup. For details, visit Barracuda Backup and disaster recovery consulting and management.

Altaro VM Backup Solutions for Backup and Disaster Recovery
Altaro VM Backup software provides small organizations a reliable and affordable platform for backing up and restoring Hyper-V and VMware-powered VMs. Altaro VM Backup can be deployed in local, offsite, multi-site, and cloud environments and also supports cost-effective backup to Microsoft Azure Block Blob storage. Headline features include state-of-the-art Augmented Inline Deduplication to reduce backup storage requirements, Continuous Data Protection with backup intervals as short as five minutes for reducing your Recovery Point Objective, advanced encryption, item-level restore capability for specific files and emails, support for Windows Cluster Shared Volumes and VMware vCenter for handling large-scale deployments, and the ability to leverage Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service to back up live VMs with zero downtime. Progent is an Altaro partner and offers a broad range of services to help you to design, deploy, optimize and troubleshoot a backup and disaster recovery system powered by Altaro VM Backup. For details, go to Altaro VM Backup Consulting Services.

Consulting for Double-Take Software for Data Backup and Recovery
Double-Take Software publishes a family of tools designed to deliver small businesses a variety of affordable alternatives for backing up and restoring business-critical workloads including Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Blackberry, and Microsoft Office SharePoint. Progent’s disaster recovery planning consultants have in-depth backgrounds incorporating Double-Take technology into small business information networks to create a high state of availability and disaster recovery capability at an affordable cost. To read more, see Consulting Services Double-Take Software for Backup.

CRISC-Certified Network Risk Management
The Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control (CRISC) certification program was initiated by ISACA to validate a consultant's skills to design, deploy, and maintain IS control mechanisms to reduce risk. Progent can provide the expertise of a CRISC-certified engineer to assist you to create and carry out a business continuity plan based on leading practices identified by CRISC and geared to align with your company's risk tolerance, business goals, and budgetary guidelines. For details, see CRISC-Certified network risk mitigation specialists.

Contact Progent for Help with VMware SRM Disaster Recovery Solutions
For more information about Progent's consulting services for VMware Site Recovery Manager, call 1-800-993-9400 or visit Contact Progent.