Leap protects your guest VMs and orchestrates their disaster recovery (DR) to other Nutanix clusters when events causing service disruption occur at the primary availability zone (site). For protection of your guest VMs, protection policies with Asynchronous, NearSync, or Synchronous replication schedules generate and replicate recovery points to other on-prem availability zones (sites). Recovery plans orchestrate DR from the replicated recovery points to other Nutanix clusters at the same or different on-prem sites.
Protection policies create a recovery point—and set its expiry time—in every iteration of the specified time period (RPO). For example, the policy creates a recovery point every 1 hour for an RPO schedule of 1 hour. The recovery point expires at its designated expiry time based on the retention policy. If there is a prolonged outage at a site, the Nutanix cluster retains the last recovery point to ensure you do not lose all the recovery points. For NearSync replication (lightweight snapshot), the Nutanix cluster retains the last full hourly snapshot. During the outage, the Nutanix cluster does not clean up the recovery points due to expiry. When the Nutanix cluster comes online, it cleans up the recovery points that are past expiry immediately.
For High Availability of a guest VM, Leap enables replication of its recovery points to one or more on-prem sites. A protection policy can replicate recovery points to maximum two on-prem sites. For replication, you must add a replication schedule between sites. You can set up the on-prem sites for protection and DR in the following arrangements.
The Primary and recovery Nutanix clusters at the different on-prem sites
The Primary and recovery Nutanix clusters at the same on-prem site
The replication to multiple sites enables DR to Nutanix clusters at all the sites where the recovery points replicate or exist. To enable performing DR to a Nutanix cluster at the same or different site (recovery site), you must create a recovery plan. To enable performing DR to two different Nutanix clusters at the same or different recovery sites, you must create two discrete recovery plans—one for each recovery site. In addition to performing DR to Nutanix clusters running the same hypervisor type, you can also perform cross-hypervisor disaster recovery (CHDR)—DR from AHV clusters to ESXi clusters, or from ESXi clusters to AHV clusters.
The protection policies and recovery plans you create or update synchronize continuously between the primary and recovery on-prem sites. The reverse synchronization enables you to create or update entities (protection policies, recovery plans, and guest VMs) at either the primary or the recovery sites.