An architect is designing a Business Continuity Disaster Recovery (BCDR) strategy for a Virtual Cloud
Foundation (VCF) environment with a management domain and multiple workload domains deployed in
two datacenters located in the same city.
During one of the initial workshops with stakeholders, the following information was identified:
The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for workloads is 24 hours.
The management domain must remain continuously available with Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 0.
Hardware overhead should be minimized by utilizing standby resources that host test workloads during
normal operation.
Operational overhead should be minimized.
Latency between both datacenters is 2 ms.
Which design decision should the architect document to satisfy provided requirements?
Answer
- A. Use VCF Automation to redeploy the entire environment in case of a failure.
- B. Implement vSAN stretched cluster for the management domain and Live Recovery for the workload domains. Correct
- C. Back up all workloads daily and store them in a central repository to meet RTO expectations.
- D. Use asynchronous replication for both management and workload domains.
Explanation
To ensure zero RPO and high availability for the management domain, the best-fit design is to use avSAN Stretched Cluster. With a 2ms latency and shared witness site, this design enables synchronous
replication and automatic failover, ensuring no data loss (RPO 0) and minimal downtime.
For the workload domains where 24-hour RTO is acceptable, Live Recovery (leveraging replication and
automation like Site Recovery Manager or Aria Automation Orchestrator) can be used to minimize
operational effort and still meet recovery timelines. This strategy also aligns with minimizing hardware
overhead by using the standby test infrastructure as failover capacity.
Reference: VMware Cloud Foundation Multisite Design Guide – Stretched Clusters and Disaster
Recovery VMware vSAN Stretched Cluster Architecture Design