Every day, we learn a company has experienced a serious disaster in the operation of the IT infrastructure, which has led to serious financial loss and reputational impact. System failure is the first thing that comes to mind when possible risks are calculated for the operation of IT services and the organization as a whole. However, more often than not there are other reasons: the human factor, equipment disruptions, power cuts, malware, data corruption. All this can lead to a complete shutdown of systems and applications. The successful emergency switchover to a backup site (planned or urgent) will be poor if you don’t take care to the process, the switching plan / Recovery Plan, and if you don’t update it in a timely manner and don’t test it at the right time. Incorrectly specified dependencies of Machines and Applications, undocumented changes, incorrect processes, unverified applications and services, the incorrect sequence of Virtual Machines started from Replicas are just some of the problems that can prevent successfully switching both one application and the whole data center. For this reason, Veeam recently released a new Veeam Availability Orchestrator solution to automate the management of VM replicas when switching to a backup site (the first version of the solution supports Virtual Machines on the VMware vSphere platform).

This article provides a step by step guide to install Veeam Availability Orchestrator (VAO) (version 1.0). VAO allows ensuring Disaster Recovery compliance through a reliable, automatically tested and documented DR plan (automated Disaster Recovery and Recovery Plan, automated documentation DR plan, automated testing with Virtual Labs etc.).

Continue reading