Virtualization has helped thousands of enterprises build more efficient and resilient IT infrastructures. It can do the same for your organization, but only with proper planning. Here's a look at the impact virtualization can have on business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities for key areas of your IT operations.
Human Resources
Over the long haul, virtualization should reduce your HR needs or at least expand the realm of possibilities for your existing staff. In the short term, however, incorporating virtualization into your BC/DR plan will cause training costs to rise. If your staff is new to virtualization, you'll need to introduce a new toolset, as well as a new mindset. Even routine troubleshooting will become more complex, since you're adding an extra layer to your infrastructure.
If your business is already virtualizing servers elsewhere in the enterprise, you're ahead of the game, but you still have work to do. Planning is critical, and the time and money you spend here are no-brainers. In fact, without proper planning don't even bother. Virtualization, in itself, is not a DR solution.
Take the time to identify applications and services that dovetail nicely with virtualization — and others (for example, those pesky-but-critical custom apps with the spiky resource usage) for which it's not a good fit. When you're done, go back to your original backup processes and find injection points for your new infrastructure. For example, you might decide to back up virtual server snapshots to tape. After you've built the glue to bind your old and new technology, test it and then test some more. It's not the shortest learning curve in the world, but over time, virtualization is almost guaranteed to pay back your investment.
Hardware Resources
Here's where things get a bit political. Unless your business is rolling in cash like it's 1998, IT expenditures are usually a negotiation. To get option A, you sacrifice option B, well aware that doing so will cost you in the long run. Lather, rinse and repeat until something breaks.
Virtualization projects offer an opportunity to reclaim a bit of what you've lost. By design, virtualization's efficiencies will create a hardware surplus, providing much of what you need to start building your DR backup farm. This cushion allows you to lose ground graciously, if you can keep your newfound surplus to yourself. Tears are optional, but a poker face is not.
All that said, you can push optimization too far. Virtualization will smooth out your CPU cycles, but it won't help you defy physics. Your failover hardware probably doesn't need to be as fast or extensive as your production environment, but you'll need to meet minimum performance standards for a minimum duration. You may be able to fit 10 virtual machines on one server, but that doesn't mean you should. 'Freebie' hardware is a great way to begin your DR program, but eventually, you'll need to bolster that farm with new purchases. This will come sooner than you think if your starter DR center is built of castoffs that were near end-of-life.
Business Goals
With hardware, staff and processes in place, everything that' left is the upside virtualization has always promised. Better-optimized hardware, more redundant backups, and faster clones and restores create efficiencies you can convert to profits, more fruitful projects and better sleep. Just remember that you have to earn those efficiencies with proper planning and a lot of hard work.
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