The Dell Validated Design for Manufacturing Edge encompasses VMs on VxRail and external data sources and devices that aggregate IIoT traffic. High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) are important considerations to ensure 24/7 availability of the application stack and to provide periodic testing of the availability and quick recovery in case of physical or logical failures. Design choices for HA and DR for manufacturing edge solutions on VxRail include:

• Deploy as many applications as possible on VMs on VxRail VMware clusters to leverage fault tolerance, multipathing, and several HA features of VxRail.
• Configure VM clones and application configuration backups to manage application restart and additional copies for various use cases. These copies allow proper testing of DR while helping with QA, dev/reporting, and analytics. In the event of failure, application environments can be brought up quickly, improving Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). VxRail with VMware HA also allows defining of host HA rules and live migration of VMs, and in the case of failures related to compute or storage resources, to manage ISVs' application HA.
• As previously discussed, define proper HA and DR policies based on the service profiles of the application stack. Mission critical applications should be given more emphasis.
• Security is an important consideration for HA. Ensure proper system hardening, adequate virus protection, and be certain that the necessary network and OS level securities are in place to prevent systems from malicious attacks or intrusions. The Dell Validated Design for Manufacturing Edge has components that allow nondisruptive updating. Plan and prioritize new security updates when considering the updating of the systems.