How CA ARCserve Central Virtual Standby Works

Introducing CA ARCserve Central Virtual Standby › How CA ARCserve Central Virtual Standby Works

How CA ARCserve Central Virtual Standby Works

Virtual Standby lets you protect the CA ARCserve D2D source servers functioning in your environment by doing the following:

Convert CA ARCserve D2D recovery points that are stored on the CA ARCserve D2D destination devices to VMware Virtual Disk (VMDK) or Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) formats based on a schedule.
Copy the converted data to a hypervisor system.
Create recovery point snapshots from the virtual machine VMDK or VHD data.
Monitor the health of the source server.
Power on virtual machines automatically from the recovery point snapshots upon detection of an emergency.
Note: Virtual Standby can be configured to power on recovery point snapshots automatically or manually when a problem occurs.
Recover the data from the virtual machine to the source server, after you correct the problems on the source server.

The following diagram illustrates this process:

Overview of Virtual Standby functionality.

CA ARCserve D2D (1) creates recovery points on the CA ARCserve D2D destination device (2) for the source servers. Virtual Standby converts the recovery points to virtual machine format (3) and stores the data as recovery point snapshots on the hypervisor system (4).

The monitor server (6) monitors the health of source servers. If the monitor server cannot detect a heartbeat (5) from a source server (8), the monitor server powers on a thin-provisioned virtual machine (7) on the hypervisor system (4) to function as the source server using data contained in the most recent Recovery Point Snapshot. CA ARCserve Central Virtual Standby creates a virtual machine partition that is the same size as the source server.

After you correct the problems on the source server, you can recover the source server (8) to its current state using the data (7) that is stored in the VM on the hypervisor system.

Note: If you want to back up the virtual machine after it is powered on, you can deploy a CA ARCserve D2D backup policy to the virtual machine using CA ARCserve Central Protection Manager.