The new product, takes RecoverPoint further into VMware data protection than the RecoverPoint Virtual Edition did, allowing data protection granularity at the individual VM level.
I’ll walk through the pieces, including what’s different between this product and the “full version” of RecoverPoint.
The product name pretty much covers it: this is RecoverPoint for VMware virtual machines, nothing more, nothing less. You can’t use it to protect LUNs, volumes, or datastores. Instead, you tell it which VMs to protect and it will apply the chosen protection level to all VMDKs for those VMs.
VMs can be placed into consistency groups, so policies are applied to all VMs in the group (ideal for vApps), and you can have a group of consistency groups (called a consistency group set) with the same policies.
Since RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines works in the hypervisor layer, the data protection is completely storage-agnostic. It will work with SAN or NAS from any vendor. It will work with VMware vSAN. It will work with DAS.
To work, RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines requires four components:
The key to RecoverPoint for VMware’s storage agnosticism is the vKernal Plugin. This plugin is called the Hypervisor splitter (if you’re familiar with RecoverPoint, it fulfills the same role as the old host-based splitter).
The Splitter intercepts all writes and duplicates them, sending one copy to the VMDK in was intended for, and the other to the RecoverPoint virtual appliance to apply journaling as per the data protection policies set for that VM. Because this splitting happens at the hypervisor layer — before storage is ever touched — it doesn’t matter what the storage is. If the VM lives on a datastore supported by vSphere, RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines can be used to protect it.
EMC has made the product very easy to use. In vCenter, you simply right-click a VM, then select the added RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines menu. From there, you can launch the data protection wizards that will walk you through setting the protection policies for that VM, add it to consistency groups, etc.
RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines supports:
At this time RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines does not support:
RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines will be licensed based on the number of VMs protected, starting at a minimum of 15. Discounts will be based on volume — purchase licenses for more VMs and the per-VM cost is less.
RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines will be available in October of this year.
EMC will make a fully-functional, no-charge, no time limit version of RecoverPoint available for download completely free of charge.
Go ahead and read the above sentence again. Yes, no time limit, fully-functional, no cost.
The catch? No support unless you buy licenses. Still it’s a great way to try it out before purchasing, and anybody with a home lab will now be able to have CDP for free.
Personally, I think this is a version 1.0 of what will grow to be a great product, but it’s clearly 1.0…
I love the storage agnosticism, the try and buy, the VM-level granularity, and the ease of use.
For me, this isn’t quite “there” yet until it adds:
That said, I’ll be looking forward to seeing how quickly these additional features get rolled out. If I had a home lab (Yes, yes, I need to fix that ASAP), I’d be eager to download this and kick the tires the moment it becomes available.