Thanks to VMware integration, VxRail includes integrated data protection capabilities. RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines (RP4VMs) provides continuous data protection for backup and disaster recovery. VM protection is available for single or multiple VMs, both locally and remotely. RP4VMs is a software-only data replication option that integrates with VMware vCenter. RP4VMs is managed directly from vCenter Server. It provides synchronous replication between sites, and its local replication capability makes it useful for testing and development environments. Replicated copies or snapshots can be repurposed for both short and long-term backup use cases. RP4VMs can also be used for cloud disaster recovery solutions. It is storage agnostic, so complete VxRail clusters can be replicated to cloud server providers.
A virtual RecoverPoint Appliance (vRPA) is installed in each vSphere cluster environment. The appliance manages all aspects of the data replication process. It uses IP protocol to communicate with the vSphere datastore. The vSphere Client is used to protect and recover VMs to any point in time with integrated orchestration and automation capabilities. The RP4VMs system consists of the following components:
- One or more RP4VMs clusters.
- A minimum of one virtual vRPA (maximum of eight) per RP4VMs cluster.
- An RP4VMs splitter is installed on every VMware ESXi host in the vSphere cluster that hosts the protected VMs. The splitter splits the writes coming from the hosts and sends them to the vRPA and the VMDK for the VM.
- The VMware vSphere Client plug-in manages the RP4VMs system. vSphere 6.7 U1 and later use an HTML 5 plug-in. Older releases used the vSphere Flex plug-in. The Flex plug-in is deprecated with 6.7 and above releases. The HTML5 plug-in is a dedicated server that provides replication management for one or more RP4VMs systems. Communication is handled using REST API.
The following figure shows the RP4VMs system architecture with the vSphere HTML5 plug-in:
(Source: Dell Integrated Data Protection Product Guide)