Disaster recovery in a virtualized environment

Vijay Mhaskar

BANGALORE, INDIA:  According to Gartner: “Virtualization will transform how IT is managed, what is bought, how it is deployed, how companies plan and how they are charged. As a result, virtualization is creating a new wave of competition among infrastructure vendors that will result in considerable market disruption and consolidation over the next few years.”

Virtualization has gained a lot of traction in the recent times finding favor with small and big companies alike. As organizations recognize the benefits of adopting virtualization as a technology of the future, more and more businesses are driving innovation through the virtualization route. Though this technology is transforming the datacenter through enabling better utilization of resources since, it does increase the risk of application downtime.

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How?  One may ask: In the physical world, if a server goes down, three or four applications may be affected. But in the virtual world, where 10 or even 20 applications may be running on a single physical machine, the impact of downtime is much greater.

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And make no mistake:

The surging cost of downtime is putting more and more pressure on the business, which in turn means more and more pressure on IT. For a business to stay agile especially large organizations, virtualization of datacenters has become a fact of life. Hence, it has become crucial for organizations to recognize the risks associated with virtualization and implement a strategy to tackle the same.

Here is what organizations need to know to get the same level of high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) protection in the virtual server environment as in the physical environment.

Virtualization and HA/DR pain points

Let’s begin by looking at how virtualization affects HA/DR planning today.

According to the India findings of the sixth annual Symantec Disaster Recovery Study, as Indian enterprises increasingly adopt virtualization, it is having a big impact on their disaster recovery plans. The study highlights that in India, nearly 50 percent of data on virtual systems is not regularly backed up and only 10 percent of the data and mission-critical applications in virtual environments are protected by replication. The data also highlights that 70 percent of those surveyed were concerned about data loss as an impact of a disaster.

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The study indicated that virtualization led 71 percent to re-evaluate DR plans in 2010; this is up from the 61 percent reported by respondents in 2009.

The biggest issue which organizations face today is that most of the virtualizations solutions in the market are typically starting-point solutions. They don’t provide visibility or monitor any applications, application components, the virtual machine, the network connection, the storage connection, or the status of the data center site itself .Also, they don’t provide protection in case an application fails. This is a big issue especially as more and more mission-critical applications move to virtual environments.

For companies to move mission-critical applications onto virtual servers, they need to be confident that their HA/DR solution. This can be done by adopting some measures as follows:

• Monitor applications and application components, including the virtual machine, network components, storage components, and the physical server
• Notify administrators of failures in any of those resources
• Automate the recovery and startup of applications including reconnecting users to the restarted application

Automating the recovery is critical, given the realities of today’s data center. At a time when the data center is harder than ever to manage, many enterprises are struggling to recruit and retain qualified staff. We recommend that organizations curb the costs of downtime by implementing more automation tools that minimize human involvement.

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The importance of global visibility:

Organizations are facing the challenge of managing disparate virtual and physical. Managing physical and virtual platforms differently can lead to complexities and inefficiencies, including higher costs for training, software, and operations. Companies looking to simplify their IT environment should explore HA/DR solutions that support both physical and virtual server environments and provide a single management interface for their entire HA/DR infrastructure, regardless of the operating system, virtualization technology, replication technology, server and storage hardware, or location of the application.

Knowing these aspects, can lead you to effectively adopt and implement this technology.

(The author is vice president of Information Management Group, Symantec)