Disaster recovery used to be exhausting. Even worse, despite complicated and herculean efforts, enterprise disaster recovery seldom totally restored current data intact. Then virtualization came along. While not a total fix to DR dilemmas, virtualization forever changed the rocky DR landscape into something more maneuverable.
“For the most part, this change was positive; hardware abstraction, Layer 1 network abstraction, centrally stored configurations, and system relativity (single solution for an environment able to be recovered in unison) all improved a company’s ability to recover their infrastructure,” explains Gregory L. Smith, senior product architect at Disaster Recovery (DR) vendor SunGard Availability Services.
Beyond improved data retrieval, another top advantage to virtualization use in DR is its bankability. The return on investment (ROI) on DR efforts typically climbs in proportion to virtualization use – if for no other reason than critical systems can be brought back up on less hardware.
But there are other time and cost savings as well.
“Testing recovery with virtual systems is much easier, as you don’t need to physically power down systems and bring recovery machines up,” notes Dave Shackleford, a security and virtualization consultant and a 2010 VMware vExpert. “The entire recovery process can be simulated easily.” Easy testing makes disaster preparation all the more likely and thus increases the probability of success in the wake of an actual disaster.
Efficiency increases even further since it takes fewer employees to retrieve and manage virtualized environments. This is particularly important after a disaster, when it may be much harder to move personnel into place because of disrupted transportation, physical environmental hazards or health quarantines.
While virtualization offers many recovery options – i.e. you can easily move workloads to different hardware, a different data center, or a third-party cloud – it isn’t necessarily possible or desirable to virtualize everything. “You still need to accommodate some specific hardware dependencies – virtualization doesn’t hide every aspect of chip architecture, for example – but it is clearly much better than a physical architecture,” says Andi Mann, vice president of Product Marketing at CA Technologies. Compliance issues also come into play.
Virtualization doesn’t just simplify disaster recovery, it also enables new capabilities.
Before virtualization, DR was accomplished by lengthy and laborious restore efforts for the complete system. Now, virtualization enables the transport of the entire operating system, configurations, and data in one move with total disregard for dissimilar hardware.
“This allows any system in your virtualization environment to utilize advanced replication-based DR strategies with no need to be customized on a per system basis,” explains Smith. “Economies of scale can now follow through to people, processes and procedures in addition to software and hardware for DR.”
Virtualization is not limited to servers in the datacenter; there is a desktop side of the equation with its own set of variables. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is an alternative desktop delivery model that shifts data and applications from the physical desktop to a virtual one in the datacenter, therefore making the information distinct from the device.
“As computing shifted from centralized to distributed approaches, enterprise applications moved to a client/server model,” notes Smith. “With a client/server model, the complexity for disaster recovery increases dramatically.”
“With the introduction of virtual desktops into the enterprise ecosystem, the client/server interaction can be recovered in parity, preventing the need to distribute control of both sides of the client/server recovery,” he adds.
Virtualization has forever changed the datacenter and disaster recovery – and it’s here to stay. The pay-offs are just too great for enterprises to ignore.
Related Information From Dell.com: A Smarter Path to Virtualization.
       
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