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BlueXP disaster recovery

Add BlueXP disaster recovery service to your BlueXP account for Amazon EVS

Contributors amgrissino
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BlueXP disaster recovery is a licensed product offering that must be purchased before it can be used. There are several types of licenses and several ways that you can purchase licenses. A license entitles you to protect a specific amount data for a specific span of time.

For more information about BlueXP disaster recovery licenses, see Set up licensing for BlueXP disaster recovery.

License types

There are two primary license types:

  • NetApp offers a 30-day trial license that you can use to evaluate BlueXP disaster recovery using your ONTAP and VMware resources. This license provides 30 days of use for an unlimited amount of protected capacity.

  • Purchase a production license if you want DR protection beyond the 30-day trial period. This license can be purchased through the marketplaces of any of NetApp’s cloud partners, but for this guide, we recommend that you purchase your NetApp Intelligent Services license for BlueXP disaster recovery using the Amazon AWS Marketplace. To learn more about purchasing a license through the Amazon Marketplace, see Subscribe through AWS Marketplace.

Size your disaster recovery capacity needs

Before you purchase your license, you should understand how much ONTAP storage capacity you need to protect. One of the advantages of using NetApp ONTAP storage is the high efficiency with which NetApp stores your data. All data stored in an ONTAP volume — such as VMware datastore hosting VMs — is that the data is stored in a highly efficient manner. ONTAP defaults to three types of storage efficiency when writing data to physical storage: compaction, deduplication, and compression. The net result is storage efficiencies of between 1.5:1 and 4:1 depending on the types of data being stored. In fact, NetApp offers a storage efficiency guarantee for certain workloads.

This can benefit you because BlueXP disaster recovery computes capacity for the purposes of licensing after all ONTAP storage efficiencies are applied. For example, let’s say you have provisioned a 100 terabyte (TiB) NFS datastore within vCenter to host 100 VMs that you want to protect using the service. Additionally, let’s assume when the data is written to the ONTAP volume, automatically applied storage efficiency techniques result in those VMs consuming only 33TiB (3:1 storage efficiency). BlueXP disaster recovery needs to be licensed only for 33TiB, not 100TiB. This can be a very large benefit to the total cost of ownership for your DR solution when compared to other DR solutions.

Steps

  1. To determine how much data is being consumed on each volume hosting a VMware datastore to be protected, determine the on-disk capacity consumption by running the ONTAP CLI command for each volume: volume show-space -volume < volume name > -vserver < SVM name > .

    For example:

    cluster1::> volume show-space
Vserver : vm-nfs-ds1
Volume  : vol0
Feature                                Used      Used%
-----------------------------      --------     ------
User Data                           163.4MB         3%
Filesystem Metadata                   172KB         0%
Inodes                               2.93MB         0%
Snapshot Reserve                    292.9MB         5%
Total Metadata                        185KB         0%
Total Used                          459.4MB         8%
Total Physical Used                 166.4MB         3%

  2. Note the Total Physical Used value for each volume. This is the amount of data that BlueXP disaster recovery needs to protect, and it is the value that you will use to determine how much capacity you need to license.