EnsureDR Cloud - Quick Start Guide
EnsureDR Cloud is a cloud-based disaster recovery solution designed to ensure high availability of critical applications in the event of a disaster. This technical article aims to provide a detailed guide to the entire process of using EnsureDR Cloud, from the initial subscription to running successful EnsureDR Cloud jobs. A Job represents an application in a specific target account/region, enabling users to define server groups, boot order, drill schedules, delays, and email reports.
To get started with EnsureDR Cloud, you need to follow a series of steps to configure and initiate the service. These steps are as follows:
- Set up AWS DRS replication: This step involves configuring Elastic Disaster Recovery.
- What is Elastic Disaster Recovery? Click here to learn more
- Enable Elastic Disaster Recovery. Click here to learn more
- Installing the AWS Replication Agent. Click here to learn more
- Create an EnsureDR Cloud user in your AWS account with the necessary permissions. This is achieved by running a YAML template in the AWS CloudFormation console. Click here to learn more
- Create an AWS key and secret to use with EnsureDR Cloud. Detailed instructions on how to create these credentials can be found. Click here to learn more
- Sign up for EnsureDR Cloud. Click here to learn more
- Create a new Job by clicking the "Create Job" button. Click here to learn more
- Run the job on the Jobs screen. The job will automatically perform recovery, validation checks, and cleanup once it is initiated. Click here to learn more
- After the job has been completed, review the results in the report that appears on the right side of the Jobs screen. Click here to learn more
Creating an EnsureDR Cloud User through YAML in the CloudFormation Console
EnsureDR Cloud has created a YAML script that can be executed within the AWS CloudFormation console to streamline the user creation process and permission configuration. This eliminates the need for manual configuration and simplifies the overall process. Please navigate to the AWS CloudFormation Console Create stack page.
Note: If you haven't signed up into AWS before accessing the CloudFormation console, you will be required to go through an authorization process. This may result in a different startup page appearing in your situation.
Step 1, keep the default selection as displayed and input the Amazon S3 URL provided here:https://ensuredrtemplate.s3.amazonaws.com/EnsureDR_Template.yaml
Once the URL has been added, click "Next" to proceed with the next step of the process.
- Assign a name to your stack.
- Specify a name for your EnsureDR Cloud account or leave it as the default name.
- Provide a name for the group or leave it as the default name.
Once you have entered the required details, click Next to proceed.
In Step 3, Configure stack options, scroll to the bottom of the page.
To proceed to the next step, click Next.
In Step 4, Review, once you have reviewed the stack details, scroll down to the bottom of the page.
To proceed with the stack creation, ensure that you have selected the checkbox that reads "I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources with custom names." This option can be found at the bottom of the page and needs to be selected before clicking Submit.
To monitor the progress of the stack creation process, you can click refresh (indicated by a red square in the image) to receive updates from the AWS CloudFormation console.
Upon the successful completion of the process, you can verify the status by checking the AWS CloudFormation console output, which will be displayed similar to the example shown below.
After successfully implementing the YAML template, the next step is to create an access key and secret key for the newly created user in AWS IAM, which will be required while creating a job in the EnsureDR Cloud web console.
After opening the AWS IAM Console, navigate to the left pane and click Users. From there, select the user you created from the list that appears in the right pane.
In the user details page of the AWS IAM Console, navigate to the Security credentials tab, scroll down to the section Access keys and click on the Create access key button.
After clicking Create access key, a new window will appear. Select Command Line Interface (CLI) then at the bottom of the page click on the checkbox “I understand the above recommendation and want to proceed to create an access key”, then click Next.
Click Create access key. Setting a description tag is optional and not mandatory.
From there, you can download the access and secret keys as a CSV file by clicking Download .csv file. Finally, click Done to exit the window.
All the necessary prerequisites to start using EnsureDR Cloud have been completed. It is important to save the downloaded file containing the access and secret keys in a secure location or copy the data into a password manager for future use.
EnsureDR Cloud SaaS Registration
Navigate to https://cloud.ensuredr.com/user/register and enter your registration data then click Sign Up.
EnsureDR Cloud Job Configuration
On the EnsureDR Cloud web console welcome page, you can create a new job by clicking on the Create Job button. This will open a new page where you can configure the settings for the job.
To create a new job, you need to provide a name and specify an AWS region. You will also need to enter the AWS access key and secret key associated with your account. Once you have entered this information, click Next to proceed.
In order to keep the quick user guide concise, we will provide an overview of the main points here. For a more comprehensive description of all fields, please refer to the accompanying document.
A scan of your AWS environment will be conducted based on the region selected in the previous step. All servers that exist in the specified AWS region will be listed. From the left panel, select all the servers that you want to add to the job, then click on the blue arrow icon in the middle to move the selected servers to the right panel.
Once you have selected the desired servers to be added to the job, they will appear on the right panel. To save the changes made and the job, click Save.
Run the job
After verifying all the details in the Launch Template, you can initiate a job by right-clicking on the job and selecting the Run Now (Drill) option from the menu.
EnsureDR Cloud report
The job will start running and a report preview in the running state will popup on the right.
After the job execution is complete, EnsureDR Cloud generates a report which provides insight into any issues in your environment. Reviewing this report enables you to take necessary measures to address any existing issues proactively. If an email address was entered in the EnsureDR Cloud job, an HTML copy of the report will be sent to the specified email address.