How to create a DR plan for the VMware target cloud

Creating a Disaster Recovery plan for the VMware target cloud

Task

Create a DR plan for the VMware target cloud.

Solution

This an essential step taken in advance when planning your strategy for a possible failover of selected machines to the target cloud and eventual disaster recovery.
The DR plan is the prerequisite that regulates this sequence and specifies the primary values. It is created by accessing your Acura instance and clicking on the "Add" button in the "DR plans" section (or editing an existing one by selecting the "Edit" option).

The text of a DR plan must be configured in JSON format and pasted into the editing field on the "Expert" tab. Review and Save.

Example of a DR plan:
  1. {
  2.       "devices": {
  3.             "ubuntu-small": {
  4.                   "id": "52560751-12ca-9b0e-db00-02cb718a138a",
  5.                   "guest_id": "centos64Guest",
  6.                   "hardware_ver": "vmx-11",
  7.                   "firmware": "EFI",
  8.                   "flavor": "1-2",
  9.                   "rank": 0,
  10.                   "ports": [
  11.                         {
  12.                               "name": "port_0",
  13.                               "subnet": "main_subnet"
  14.                         }
  15.                   ]
  16.             }
  17.       },
  18.       "subnets": {
  19.             "main_subnet":
  20.                   {"subnet_id": "VM Network"}}
  21.       }
  22. }


Notes
This is a JSON list containing specific information about your instances, the ones that you wish to include into the recovery plan: their names, IDs, available hardware configuration as flavor and hardware_ver, rank (desired boot order), boot option, utilized ports, and subnet information.

  1. The flavor format is defined as "vCPU-RAM", so the flavour "1-2" is equivalent to 1 CPU and 2Gb RAM for a machine. 
  1. Subnet_id is the name of a VMware network, a wide-spread template being VM Network, that is the standard default name, but make sure to check if it's relevant in your case.
  1. To select a boot option, add "firmware": "BIOS" or "firmware": "EFI" line to your DR plan. If not specified, BIOS will be used by default.