vCloud Recovery Solutions – My Life After PTO

So if nothing else the title did the job and got your full undivided attention correct?  Well, I wish I could say I have a holy grail to present on this very topic, however I do not……yet.  My life has become 100% focussed on BCDR for vCloud, and will most likely this will be the case for some time to come at least into the 1st quarter of 2012.  Many of you in the community know that I have been advocating for some time creating some thoughts around the area of recovery.  Recently in fact there was a VMware KB article on Stretched vSphere clusters with vCloud Director.  This is the first insight to some of the work we are doing on this front.  Although not BCDR the article does allow some suggestions to Disaster Avoidance as it were.  This is actually based on another effort led by the esteemed Massimo Re Ferre‘.

I, however, am leading an effort with my good friends David Hill and John Arrasjid to try and see what we can do in the short term to meet some of the requirements out there.  Now, unfortunately I cannot go into any great detail at this time about how we are approaching this, however there are a few folks that know my thoughts, and in some cases rather passionate opinion on recovery of the vCloud infrastructure itself.  There are plenty of third parties working on the vApps and Virtual machines in the cloud, but being an ex-administrator I want to really drive the recovery of the cloud itself.  That being said we are looking at all angles of recovery to see what kinds of possible solutions we can come up with

What I can say is I have gained the ears of a lot of teams within VMware including engineering and product management, and the wheels are starting to turn.  I have been getting calls and emails daily to try and gather a team to examine the aspects of this from end to end.  In fact David, John, and I will be in Palo Alto at some point soon to really get into the weeds with some key people on this topic.  I know a lot of you are waiting and watching for what may come in the way ay backup and recovery, so all I can say…..follow David, John, and I as well as keep your eyes peeled.  It is going to be a fun, and probably bumpy ride for the three of us over the next month or so.  I think it will be well worth it in the end.  We are hoping for some quick wins fairly soon.  I am excited to be leading this project for my team, but more importantly I am excited to make a difference where all of you need it.

I have been back from PTO for all of five days and I have had more calls and emails than I can count.  For me that is all awesome, because it means we are gaining ground with the people I need to get together with.  Well I simply wanted to provide a small update on some of the things I am working on and there will certainly be more to come.