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Broker Appliance High Availability and Protection - On-Premise Appliance

The Buttonwood Cloud Broker is available as a virtual appliance which runs in your organisation's on-premise VMware vSphere environment.

The Broker is designed to be an out-of-band control mechanism for Cloud workloads, so any events causing the unavailability of the Broker appliance is not catastrophic and does not impact running workloads. With this in mind, it is still important to ensure that the Broker appliance is well protected and resumes normal activity after any downtime event, so that the organisation's deployment workflows are not impacted.

Whilst the Broker provides functionality to take configuration checkpoints, this should be used as a complimentary option to HA and Protection.

This article details the following solutions and their applicability to the Buttonwood Cloud Broker:

  • High Availability
    • VMware vSphere HA (High Availability)
    • VMware vSphere FT (Fault Tolerance)
  • Protection
    • VMware vSphere Replication
    • Third Party Backup using VADP

VMware vSphere High Availability

VMWare vSphere High Availability (vSphere HA) is the time-tested high-availability solution from VMWare that is widely used for production environment. If configured with no single points of failure, it can protect the virtual workloads from physical hardware failures.

In the event of any hardware failure, the protected workload is automatically restarted on the remaining nodes of the cluster. There is an outage for the workload for the duration of the detection of the failure and the restart of the VM and the application.

vSphere HA is very easy to set up and manage and is the simplest high-availability solution available for protecting virtual workloads.

Prerequisites for vSphere HA

As VMware vSphere HA is VMware service, refer to the vSphere HA Checklist provided by VMware for requirements and configuration steps.

In summary, the following are basic requirements for this option:

  • A cluster must contain at least two hosts
  • All hosts in the cluster must be licensed for vSphere HA
  • All hosts must have access to the same networks protected VMs are configured to utilise
  • All hosts must have access to the shared storage protected VMs reside on

VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance

In the event of server failures, VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance (vSphere FT) provides continuous availability for applications with as many as four virtual CPUs. It does so by creating a live shadow instance of a VM that is always up to date with the primary VM.

In the event of a hardware outage, vSphere FT automatically triggers failover, ensuring zero downtime and preventing data loss.

Like VMware HA, it protects against hardware failure but completely eliminates downtime with instantaneous cutover and recovery. After failover, vSphere FT automatically creates a new, secondary VM to deliver continuous protection for the application.

Prerequisites for vSphere FT

As VMware vSphere FT is VMware service, refer to the vSphere FT Checklist provided by VMware for requirements and configuration steps.

In summary, the following are basic requirements for this option:

  • vSphere HA is licensed and configured - VMware HA is a requirement for VMware FT
  • All hosts in the cluster must be licensed for vSphere FT
  • All hosts must be certified for vSphere FT

VMware vSphere Replication

VMware vSphere Replication is a hypervisor-based, asynchronous replication solution for vSphere virtual machines. It is integrated with VMware vCenter Server and the vSphere Web Client. vSphere Replication can replicate VMs within a site or across sites to add another layer of protection for virtual machines.

In a typical scenario, the Buttonwood Cloud Broker appliance can be replicated to a remote site designated as the recovery site. The Broker appliance can be recovered in the replicated site and be usable as long as its IP address or subnet is available and reachable in the recovery site.

Prerequisites for vSphere HA

As VMware vSphere Replication is VMware service, refer to the vSphere Replication Requirements documentation provided by VMware for requirements and configuration steps.

In summary, the following are basic requirements for this option:

  • vSphere Replication is licensed for the edition of vSphere in the environment
  • vSphere Replication is deployed as a virtual appliance at the source site and destination recovery site
  • vSphere Replication is integrated with VMware vCenter Web Client

Third Party Backup using VADP

VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Data Protection is VMware’s data protection framework originally introduced in vSphere 4.0 that enables backup products to do centralised, efficient, off-host backup of vSphere virtual machines.

A backup product using VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Data Protection can backup vSphere virtual machines from a central backup server or virtual machine without requiring backup agents or requiring backup processing to be done inside each guest virtual machine on the ESX host. This offloads backup processing from ESX hosts and reduces costs by allowing each ESX host to run more virtual machines.

VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Data Protection leverages the snapshot capabilities of VMware vSphere to enable backup without requiring downtime for virtual machines. As a result, backups can be performed non-disruptively at any time of the day without requiring extended backup windows and the downtime to applications and users associated with backup windows.

In a typical scenario, the backup software would be configured to perform a snapshot-based full image level backup of the Buttonwood Broker appliance. The Broker appliance can be recovered in full and accessed immediately after recovery.

Prerequisites for VADP

VMware supports a wide ecosystem of backup solutions that integrate with vSphere and vCenter using vSphere Storage APIs – Data Protection framework.

Please refer to the relevant backup software documentation for further details.

Note: VMware vSphere Data Protection (VDP) is a VMware-developed virtual appliance which utilises vSphere Storage APIs – Data Protection to provide integrated backup and recovery of virtual machines. This is included free of charge in vSphere versions 6.0/6.5, however has been discontinued in versions following.