“Software-defined” has taken over the data center, leading to many businesses adopting an IT-as-a-service approach. Leveraging a self-service approach streamlines processes by allowing users to provision as many VMs as desired on-demand. Goodbye to creating trouble tickets just so an IT administrator will create a VM!
However, the self-service approach can also make lifecycle management a challenge. How do you ensure that these newly created workloads are protected? One option is to implement a modern API-driven solution with a single software fabric that allows the provisioning tool to assign a backup policy at the creation of the workload. This technique is known as Provision and Protect and can be executed using Rubrik’s APIs and the provisioning tool of your choice.
Rubrik was built to be API-first since day one. Way back in 2015, Rubrik announced the ability to integrate with VMware vRealize Orchestrator (vRO), which allows administrators to automate tasks in both VMware vRealize Automation (vRA) and vSphere. For the Provision and Protect use case, Rubrik can be integrated into existing or new vRA blueprints surrounding VM provisioning, requiring users to select an SLA Domain during the provisioning process. This ensures that each and every time a vRA catalog item is requested, data protection policies are applied to the newly provisioned VMs.
Rubrik provides cradle-to-grave data management for VMs provisioned using vRA. Day 2 operations such as Instant Recovery, Live Mount, and on-demand snapshots are also packaged and available on GitHub. Our integration with the vRA suite takes the complexity out of managing VMs across evolving lifecycles so that you can easily automate protection by requiring SLA Domain assignment during provisioning. The Rubrik Plugin for vRealize can be downloaded here. Be sure to check out our quick start guide to get started!