Hypervisor Lab

In this post we will perform basic setup of Prism Central Disaster Recovery, protect one of the VMs we V2V’ed earlier in the series from our VMware environment, and perform a test restore to confirm everything is working. Since I am just using evaluation software with no licensing I wont be testing any of the advanced DR automation/runbooks available as part of Prism Central.

At this point in the series you should have a 3N Nutanix cluster with a Linux VM, a Windows VM, and a Prism Central all on the cluster. This cluster will become “Prod”.

If you have enough resources left in your Proxmox node you can set-up a second Nutanix cluster and Prism Central instance to be your “DR’”. This will allow you to explore Nutanix Disaster Recovery.

I chose to deploy a single node cluster for my “DR”, but if you have enough resources you could deploy another 3N cluster for this. My lab looks like this:

Enable Disaster Recovery in Prism Central

To start we need to log into both the Prod Prism Central (ntxpc01) and the DR Prism Central (ntxpc02) and enable Disaster Recovery.

Once logged into PC navigate to Prism Central Settings -> Enable Disaster Recovery -> and click Enable:

Wait for the enable to complete:

Pair Prod and DR Prism Central’s

Next from the Prod PC navigate to Administration -> Availability Zones -> Connect to Availability Zone:

Put in the DR Prism Centrals IP address/hostname and credentials and click Connect:

Wait for the connection to complete:

This will also register the Prod PC automatically in the DR PC:

Create a Protection Policy

Navigate to Data Protection -> Protection Policies -> Create Protection Policies:

Start by giving the Protection Policy a name and select your Prod and DR clusters and click Next:

Click Configure on the Replication Schedule to setup how you want the replication from Prod to DR to be done:

In my case for this lab I am going to use Asych replication instead of Sync, and I am going to chose a 1HR RPO to but back on the load on my lab gear. I am also going to keep the last 3 hours of PiT’s:

For this Protection Policy I am also going to schedule reoccurring snapshots by clicking Add Local Only Schedule:

For this I am going to take a local snapshot every 8HRs and keep 1 days worth of them:

Once you have setup your Remote and optional Local schedule click Next:

We will now set-up a category so that can tag/add VMs to this policy after its created:

I am going to use the default Environment:Production category so that any VMs I place in that category will be put into the Protection Policy:

Click Create Policy to finalize it:

Add the Linux VM to the Protection Policy

Now navigate to Compute -> VMs and click into the Linux VM (since its smaller):

Go to its Categories tab and choose Manage Categories:

Add the Environment:Production category as this is the one we have already tied to the Protection Policy:

Under Alerts you will eventually see that replication is starting:

Under Protection Summary you will see that there is now 1 Protected Entities:

And under VM Recovery Points -> Click on the VM -> Overview you will see the available Recovery Points:

This concludes the setup of basic async replication for a single VM. In the next post we will create a Recovery Plan to automate failover, and perform a Recovery Test to make sure our DR is working.