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Business continuity

Business continuity

End of Marketing: As of 17 July 2025, new deployments of VMware Regulated Workloads instances are no longer available for new customers. If you are an existing customer, you can still add or delete clusters, add or delete VMware ESXi™ servers or NFS storage, and add or remove services for your existing Regulated Workloads instances. As an existing customer, you can also view or delete your Regulated Workloads instances.

IBM Cloud® for VMware® Regulated Workloads provides business continuity only at the management and edge layers.

Management cluster

The management cluster relies upon native vSphere® DRS capabilities to keep management services available to the platform administrators. Even with the configuration of the vSphere DRS features, manual intervention is sometimes necessary to restore access to management services. The use of shared storage minimizes the necessity of manual restoration activities if a VMware ESXi™ host is lost.

Backup options
System Backup option Frequency
Active Directory / DNS Image through the Veeam® agent Daily
vCenter Backup server file Daily
NSX™ Managers Backup server file Daily
VMware Aria® Operations™ Manager VMDK through Veeam Daily
VMware Aria Operations™ for Logs VMDK through Veeam Daily
Virtual Machine Backup Server VMDK through Veeam
Juniper vSRX Backup server file through SCP from vSRX Commit change

Veeam backup server

Veeam on IBM Cloud delivers reliable backup for virtual machines (VMs) within the Regulated Workloads environment.

Veeam provides continuous backup of the management stack for protection against disasters. If corruption of any management stack component occurs, Veeam also provides rapid restoration to known good states. Veeam can also provide backup services for the workload cluster. The single site deployment must use the Veeam bare metal option to provide an acceptable backup repository.

The Veeam environment is provisioned initially with a single VM. The SaaS provider can extend this instance to their custom requirements, including remote database, more proxy servers, and scaling out of the backup repository.

Veeam is deployed to the management regions in both availability zones (AZ) for use in an MZR.

Gateway cluster

The gateway cluster does not use any vSphere resiliency features and backup of the gateway VMs is not performed. The gateway appliances deliver resilience at the application layer through formation of a high-availability cluster at the time of deployment. When you are using the vSRX, it is recommended that the rescue configuration is set anytime a change is made to the running configuration. To update it, in operational mode, run request system configuration rescue save. The use of an SCP server to automatically back up the configuration anytime changes are made is optional and left to the client to implement.

vSRX config archive on commit

system {
  archival {
    configuration {
      transfer-on-commit;
      archive-sites {
        scp://username@host:<port>url-path password password;
      }
    }
  }
}

[edit system archival configuration]
archive-sites {
  ftp://username@host:<port>url-path password password;
  scp://username@host:<port>url-path password password;
  file://<path>/<filename>;
  http://username@host: url-path password password;
}

Workload cluster

Business continuity at the workload layers is the responsibility of the SaaS provider to design, implement, and maintain.

Veeam backup server is the recommended solution.