Hello all,
The last few months I have been working in the lab on Cleondris HCC DR orchestration software. I have been working with the vendor - Cleondris - to improve it. I have enjoyed working with the vendor as they are a great bunch of people. Their development model is cool as they do a lot of updates so that is pretty nice!
The software is pretty darn cool. And easy to install and upgrade - it is an appliance. I am going to share with you some of the features.
Plan of Plan
So when I have finished testing out a failover plan, I then add it to the plan of plans. This means in a crisis I only have to execute one plan and that plan will execute all of the plans!
You can see above I have four plans in my master plan.
Multi Tier plans
Failing over fast multi tier apps is tough. I have seen it done a number of ways and it is amazing how long it can take. With Cleondris there is another way. A failover plan, can have one or more failover groups in it. So that means we can do a mult-tier plan rather nicely. In the screenshot below you can see a three tier plan but it could be bigger if necessary.
You can see how I have the databases grouped, and so they start first, then the apps, then the web server. Each group waits for VMware Tools to say the VM has started.
Do you see the field where I added TestNetwork? That is how I specify which network to use for the test failovers. I also really like the network mapping area. Very easy to say which network switch to use in production and DR.
Miscellaneous cool stuff
- You do not need to head into the NetApp HCI UI to configure replication as Cleondris will do that for you!
- The updates are super easy, upload a file and restart.
- HTML5 UI that is easy and smooth.
- You can set a destination for syslog that is only BCDR, or security, or everything. I like to have one destination for BCDR, and one for security.
- The UI has a log bundle option, and I really like it as any issues I have had they have always been able to figure it out via the log bundle!
- I can configure users to be execute only so they can trigger plans but nothing else.
I just ran out of time. Have to head to a meeting, but I think you have a good idea of why I like Cleondris HCC - right?
I recommend it strongly to people that need DR orchestration.
Any questions or comments let me know,
Michael
=== END ===
