There is an old saying, “The devil is in the details”. If you have ever assumed something and then had to pay more, fix something or be left in a spot were what you bought wasn’t going to work, you have felt this pain. Late last year I wrote an article around the importance of Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) along with providing the Recovery Time Objectives (RTO). I wanted to share some more technical details of my on-premises lab cluster that I am using to connect to the Xi East Region. I want to prove Xi Leaps SLA around RTO while maintaining performance of your application when you do failover.
Proven Results
During my testing I was able to achieve:- A restore time under 8 sec per VM
- The same virtual machine on-prem or in Xi could achieve the same performance, +600,000 transaction per minute
- Nutanix snapshots are efficient over the wire to Xi when creating VMs from the same image
For more detailed information please read the rest of the blog and watch the 3 videos included below.
My current lab cluster is running in a Phoenix colo running varied services, Active Directory, Citrix for VDI failover testing, SQL performance and varied multi-tier application to testing power on sequence.
My Xi Region is located in Xi East, Ashburn, Virginia. The average latency replicating between Phoenix, AZ to Ashburn is ~58 ms replicating over a software VPN provided my Palo Alto. We do support 5 different network vendors with automatic configuration for on-prem but we are not limited to those devices.
Efficient Hardware Based Snapshots
I deployed a medium sized SQL server on-prem with 6 vCPU, 32 GB of RAM, 8 vDisks using 450 GB of storage with lots of spare capacity. Once the first copy on the server was replicated, I wanted to show the efficiency of Nutanix snapshots as I cloned an additional 10 copies on-prem and protected them with Xi Leap. The below video highlights how the metadata is tracked and replicated but not the entire 450 GB x 10 times. You will see that by the time I log into my Xi tenant that the replication is completed. Therefore, if you’re building lots of VMs off the same image, you won’t have to pay the network and storage costs in Xi for the full capacity. Also since these are hardware based snapshots you don’t have to worry about long snapshot chains and spending the time to manually collapse them.Low RTO
Now that we have our 10 SQL VMs fully replicated to Xi, lets see how long it takes to restore them. We tell customers that if you failed over 200 VMs it would roughly take 20 mins for a complete restore. Watch below to see the easy failover process.The above video was able to demonstrate that we are able to restore VMs under 10 secs per virtual machine (video was 7.7 secs per virtual machine). The speed of recovery is attributed to having the same image format for your on-prem and cloud solution. The same image format also allows you move back to on-prem when your ready without having to go through a conversion process on your virtual machines, this also lowers the RTO moving back to on-prem. With having the same management framework and VM image format user error should be avoided when the pressure is on to get your business critical services back up and running.
Consistent High Performance
Since we had some good sized SQL VMs in Xi I wanted to wrap up the restore process by showing how we can achieve similar performance to running on-prem without worrying about figuring out new cloud storage constructs figured out. The below video highlights having the same data centre operating system on-prem and in the cloud provides flexibility without sacrificing performance.
Figure 1 Similar performance with on-prem and in the cloud
With Xi Leap you can quickly get your business back up and running without worrying about performance, retraining your IT staff and without maintaining a second DR data centre. One-click failover experience while maintaining all the benefits from on-prem.
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