To maintain optimal uptime, high availability, and business continuity a comprehensive and up to date disaster recovery plan must be in place and meticulously documented. Disasters can be caused by power outages, human error, and certainly natural disasters. Server or data center downtime can cost the company dearly  whether it be monetary or a negative impact on reputation. Disaster recovery plans must also be tested thoroughly from time to time to make sure they are effective and meet recovery time constraints. In a data center that does not use virtualization this becomes a costly investment. A testing environment must be set up utilizing similar hardware to emulate what is already in place for an accurate test and analysis.

One of the many benefits of virtualization is the ease in which disaster recovery plans can be created and tested. When testing disaster recovery for virtual machines you eliminate the necessity of similar hardware as the VM’s are hardware independent. You can test your recovery plan using machines that have been taken out of production as long as they have the same hypervisor or virtual machine monitor on them.

Furthermore, the need to install the OS and all of the related applications to bring a machine back up is eliminated as virtual machines are just a collection of files that can easily be backed up in their entirety by copying them off (or backing them up) to another location. To restart the backed up virtual machine just copy it over to an operational server and start it up. This greatly reduces the time required for recovery.

If your entire data center has been brought down due to any nature of disaster the high portability of virtual machines allows you to transfer them to an alternate data center that is out of the affected area and restart. Your entire data center can be restarted at an alternate location using virtualization.

To further enhance and shorten the disaster recovery timeframe there are tools available that can facilitate the process by automatically transferring and restarting your virtual infrastructure at a predefined location. These tools are capable of advanced features such as the ability to start virtual machines in a pre-defined order so that any dependencies are resolved before the virtual machines that rely on them are started. A good example would be a virtual machine that ran an application which required a database to be running before it could start.        

Utilizing virtualization in your data center or server room assists you in overcoming some of the most trying and difficult tasks you may ever have to face. Due to the simple concept of virtualization separating hardware and the guest OS or virtual machine many tedious processes can become much simpler through automation and proper planning.