In my 13 years at ePlus I’ve had the good fortune to bring quite a few offerings to the market. One key to being successful is to “benchmark” what other providers are doing in the space you’re entering.
As we’ve studied Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) over the last few years it was hard to find a consistent approach to testing, even the most basic testing. In disaster recovery, we typically refer to isolated testing as “Bubble” testing. Workloads are made available in a disconnected network for limited (or possible extensive) testing to ensure they are in a strong position for recovery.
Many offerings do this process annually or biannually. We feel this is not sufficient, so we put the effort into automating the process from end to end and we execute it monthly for every customer.
Our Process
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Our offering discovers all protected virtual machines (VMs).
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Every VM is recovered into a disconnected virtual network.
- This network is “black-holed” and cannot connect to anything within the corporate network or externally.
- This process is handled in parallel for multiple VMs so we can test against larger environments in a reasonable amount of time.
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The VM is monitored to ensure it boots and the agent responds.
- This is a key step, as many testing processes assume if the VM boots then it’s successful.
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Once the VM checks in, it’s cleaned up.
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If a VM does not check in during the time period, an issue is logged for an ePlus engineer to investigate.
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Each customer has a defined expectation around network assignments, licensing, and recovery plans.
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A companion offering verifies all of these settings.
- Is the subnet assigned?
- Is it supposed to have a static IP, is it assigned?
- Is it supposed to use Azure Hybrid Benefits?
- What recovery plan should it be in?
- What group (stage) in the plan is it in?
- Are any VMs not assigned to recovery plans?
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An automated status report is sent monthly detailing the test results.
Confidence
Creating a DRaaS offering, and committing to stand with customer organizations in the event that the day no one hopes for comes, is a sobering activity. It’s crucial that you have confidence in that recovery. Doing this basic level of testing every month helps tremendously. Next time I’ll detail our process for “Bubble+.”
Have questions or comments? Feel free to contact us directly at ecms@eplus.com anytime. Be sure to check out the full ePlus Cloud Managed Services blog. Happy Clouds!