vCloud Air – Disaster Recovery
vCloud Air – Disaster Recovery is a recovery-as-a-service (RaaS) offering intended to protect virtual
workloads managed by VMware vSphere that are either deployed in a private cloud or data center.
Subscribing to Disaster Recovery is a separate enrollment process whether you already are a vCloud Air
customer. If you are not a Disaster Recovery customer, you will not see the Disaster Recovery functionality
in your vCloud Air Web UI.
To implement and consume vCloud Air – Disaster Recovery, you require vSphere Replication. vSphere
Replication copies a virtual machine to another location, within or between clusters, and makes that copy
available for recovery through the VMware vSphere Web Client or through the orchestration of a full
disaster recovery product such as VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager.
With Disaster Recovery, you can use vCloud Air to monitor and manage the virtual machines you are
replicating to the cloud. In the event of a disruption at the source site, you use the vCloud Air Web UI to
recover your on-premises virtual machines from placeholder virtual machines replicated to the public cloud.
For information about Disaster Recovery, see the vCloud Air – Disaster Recovery User's Guide.
Differences Between the Offerings
The services have the following billing and registration differences:
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For Dedicated Cloud, Virtual Private Cloud, and Disaster Recovery, you are billed monthly for a fixed
amount of resource capacity regardless of your usage.
See How to Buy Cloud Computing for information about registering for these services.
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For Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand, you register online and provide credit card information.
See Create Your Account in vCloud Air – Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand Getting Started.
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Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand does not require a time commitment or upfront payment.
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With Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand, you are billed for per-minute metered usage of compute
capacity. Some months, you might not incur any charges. Usage costs are provided in pricing tiers.
See “About Resource Billing,” on page 67 and VMware vCloud Air Pricing.
The vCloud Air offerings have the following functional differences:
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Like the subscription-based Virtual Private Cloud service,Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand is delivered
within a logically isolated virtual private cloud environment on the vCloud Air multi-tenant
infrastructure. However, unlike the subscription-based Virtual Private Cloud, customers can create
virtual data centers to sub-allocate computing resources in Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand.
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In Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand, virtual data centers are created based on a standard resource
template. Customers can contact VMware Support to increase template resource limits as needed. In the
Dedicated Cloud service, customers can create virtual data centers with customized allocations for
compute and storage. Additionally, in the Dedicated Cloud service, customers can lock their virtual
data centers to prevent users from changing virtual machine states and customers can set virtual
machine quotas for virtual data centers.
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In Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand, customers can create virtual machines in any location where
Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand is supported. In the subscription-based offerings, customers purchase
compute services based on location.
See “Geographical Locations,” on page 49 and vCloud Air Data Center Locations for information.
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Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand does not support activity logs, locking virtual data centers, the Data
Protection Service, and Direct Connect at this time.
Chapter 1 Introducing Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand
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