CPM provides a DR option that can be used to easily send backup data from one region to another should you need to restore your EC2 instances in another AWS region. This post details the process of sending US-East (N. Virginia) backup data to US-West (Oregon).
Configure CPM Disaster Recovery Options
- Within CPM, click Policies. Under the Configure heading, click DR for the backup policy data you wish to send to another AWS region.
- On the DR Options window, select the Target Region and click Apply. In this instance, the default settings for the other options are acceptable.
- A new status column, DR Status, is added. When DR is enabled, the backup data is copied to the DR region after the backup completes. If the DR portion is successful, the DR Status will read Completed as shown below:
- You can review the backup log to verify successful DR.
Perform a DR EC2 Instance Recovery
- Within CPM, click Backup Monitor | Recover
- In this example, the EC2 instance LAB-RDS01 will be restored to the US West (Oregon) region. On the Recovery Panel page, select US West (Oregon) in the Restore to Region option.
- On the Instance Recovery page, ensure the appropriate Basic and Advanced options are selected and click Recover Instance. Since the instance will be recovered in a new region, at a minimum you will need to specify an appropriate Key Pair, VPC, VPC Subnet, and Security Group.
- When returned to the Recovery Panel, click Open Recovery Monitor to track the recovery status.
- On the Recovery Monitor page, monitor the recovery job until the Status reads Recovery Successful.
- Connect to the instance and verify the success of the recovery job. In this example, the instance was recovered to a private subnet, thus it was necessary to first connect to a bastion host on a public network in order to test RDP access. If the instance was restored to a public subnet, you could RDP or SSH directly into the instance assuming the security groups and network ACLs allowed the connection.
As you can see, setting up a DR backup copy in Cloud Protection Manager is very easy and could prove beneficial as part of your DR business plan.
