recovery

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. Read More »