Welcome

Learn what virtualization technology is and how it can improve your business continuity plan. By the end of this lesson, you'll understand the general capabilities and components of virtualization and how it can best be applied to your organization in support of your business continuity plan.

Why do you need business continuity or disaster recovery plans?

The list of potential business disrupting natural and man-made disasters continues to grow. Natural disasters, blackouts, computer viruses and even terrorist attacks are all possible disaster scenarios that our society faces every day—and businesses are not immune to these events. Consequently, being prepared for a disaster with a quick and robust recovery plan isn't just good business, it's smart business.

When contemplating whether to create a continuity or disaster recovery plan, be mindful that natural and man-made disasters can happen anywhere at any time. If you have the plan in place before a disaster strikes, implementing the plan after the crisis is easier than scrambling to come up with a plan when your business is damaged or destroyed.

First, let's discuss the difference between business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) planning. Both of these terms are used synonymously; however, unlike business continuity, disaster recovery is more commonly associated with the processes you use to resume and continue your business after a disaster strikes. Some businesses have difficulty with the idea of accepting that a disaster will strike their business, and as a result, are more likely to lean towards business continuity planning. The business continuity planning approach is more comprehensive because it focuses on recovery as well as how the business can continue to operate and make money after a major disaster.

Irrespective of which term is used in your business, for purposes of this brief, both business continuity and disaster recovery are defined as how your business will keep operating after a disruptive event while the main operational facilities are being restored to full operation.

In the publication, The Definitive Handbook for Business Management, it states a staggering statistic that "…between 60–90% of companies that don't have a proactive disaster plan find themselves out of business within 24 months of experiencing a major disaster."

Yet, even with the overwhelming evidence that it's important to keep your business operating in the event of a disaster, until now the implementation of an expeditious recovery plan was a time-consuming and costly endeavor. This is largely due to the best practices of maintaining recovery equipment that mirrors the equipment in production in your main operations facility. Each time there's an upgrade to the equipment in the production facility, the same upgrades must occur at the recovery site. Many businesses forego this process due to the time and costs associated with this effort.

What many companies typically do in order to minimize costs associated with disaster recovery is limit the disaster coverage to only mission critical applications. To support this strategy, companies may employ highly manual processes in order to compensate for disparate equipment. Or, they may outsource to companies that specialize in disaster recovery. However, these companies generally work on a "first come/first serve" basis, meaning that your company might not be restored right away in the event of a wide-spread disaster.

So what's a business to do? Luckily, virtualization technology solves this dilemma. Virtualization technology is a cost-effective and efficient way to approach disaster recovery. Let's explore what virtualization is and how it can benefit your business in the event of a disaster.

What's virtualization and how does it benefit disaster preparedness?

Virtualization, as it relates to disaster recovery, is about simplifying the disaster recovery infrastructure requirements and reducing costs through eliminating the need for redundant hardware. You can think of virtualization as making a single physical device (such as a storage device, server or operating system) appear to function as multiple logical resources or making multiple physical resources (such as storage devices and servers) appear as a single logical resource.

Virtualization is a concept in which a company can create a storage facility that contains several disk subsystems (from individual or multiple vendors) that's geographically in another location, if desired. Within this storage facility, the storage equipment is split or partitioned, into virtual disks that are visible to the networks or systems that use them.

In implementations where virtualization is not in use, maintaining dual configurations at the production and recovery sites is the best and safest practice. Concurrent upgrades are necessary, but frequently this isn't even possible since hardware from the same series and from the same manufacturer will likely have different Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) settings, stepping levels, firmware revisions or support lifecycles. The lack of consistency in hardware platforms results in unreliable restoration and can include several manual operations to accommodate the differences in hardware.

With the complexity of APIs in companies today as well as the differences in vendor disaster recovery APIs, it's a best practice for IT managers to learn each solution and to develop different strategies for each of the components in their business continuity plan. In addition, they must understand how all of these disparate APIs and plans will work together.

It's better to create a solid, workable contingency plan (in writing) now rather than scrambling and reacting while triaging events after a disaster strikes.

Keep the contingency plan in a safe place (at an offsite location) that's accessible and known by several of your trusted colleagues who will be there when it comes time to recover/rebuild the business. As always, use the plan only when you need it—when disaster strikes.

If your company adopts a disaster recovery strategy without virtualization, be mindful that each plan has its variations. Also, be sure to test the strategy and see how the plan holds up in a time of "crisis." If there isn't a fully functioning failover site, obtaining hardware to test the recovery plan can be challenging, especially in a time of crisis. An untested plan can leave your organization with a false sense of security.

Without virtualization, a business continuity plan is time consuming, expensive, complex, slow and unreliable. Some common pitfalls when implementing a disaster recovery site include:

• Requiring identical hardware configurations at the production and recovery sites.
• Maintaining recovery sites are expensive and are often not used.
• Maintaining a recovery site is often prohibitive because of the high cost of real estate.
• Cooling and power costs add to the cost of maintaining a recovery site.
• Operating complex tools requires specialized skills, especially when it comes to specific API's and processes to support the continuity plan.
• Implementing traditional recovery methods, such as system image or tape, have a high rate of failure.
• Testing generally fails or is difficult to accomplish.

Virtualization enables multiple virtual machines to run concurrently on the same physical device. By separating the operating system from the physical hardware, virtualization enables you to:

• Quickly provision, copy and save virtual machines so that you can move information from one physical server to another. This enables zero downtime maintenance as well as enables workload consolidation.
• Create virtual machines with their own fully configured virtual hardware to run operating systems and applications.
• Operate many virtual machines with heterogeneous operating systems concurrently on the same physical machine.

Through virtualization, you can consolidate applications in a virtual environment, share resources among many applications and employ a wide range of replication and backup technologies to duplicate systems and data to an offsite location, which is a key component to a business continuity plan.

Now that you know the basics of virtualization, let's dive deeper into the core technology that enables virtualization, VMware® Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3).

Introducing the VMware infrastructure

For businesses to embrace a disaster recovery strategy, company executives, chief information officers as well as IT directors and managers must balance the cost of implementing a business continuity plan against the probability that a disaster significantly impacting business operations would actually occur. Building a business continuity plan around a virtual infrastructure significantly drives down implementation costs.

VMware VI3 provides for rapid recovery and is cost-effective and reliable as it:

• Provides for immediate provisioning, faster and easier backup and recovery and is completely hardware independent.
• Makes recovery cost effective through server consolidation savings as well as the re-use of your existing servers at your recovery site.
• Simplifies testing which will ensure credibility and confidence in your business continuity plan.

Let's look in more detail at how the VMware Virtual Infrastructure provides these benefits.

Exploring VMware VI3 features

To fully understand how VMware VI3 benefits disaster recovery, it's important to look at the four key components that make up VMware: partitioning, encapsulation, hardware independence and isolation.

• Partitioning: Enables the consolidation of many operating systems and applications on the same device, which drives up server utilization while reducing capital outlay.
• Encapsulation: Comprises all of the components that make up an entire server—the operating system image, application, data, configurations and system state—are stored as a file on a disk rather than as separate entities on separate storage media. By storing information on a disk, tasks such as backup and recovery, server migration, disaster recovery server provisioning and replication are streamlined.
• Hardware independence: VMware virtual machines can operate on any x86 hardware—all the more reason to establish a disaster recovery site. The complexities associated with traditional recovery methods, such as system images, error prone tape recovery and bare-metal restore are minimized. You can also install the virtual machine on any hardware, so maintaining exact configurations is no longer necessary. You can redeploy existing servers and avoid purchasing new ones, thereby saving money, which you can use when disaster strikes.
• Isolation: By isolating virtual problems on one virtual machine, other virtual machines keep running smoothly while still using the same physical device. In addition, you're able to conduct disaster recovery tests on the actual disaster recovery server without impacting virtual machines.

You can minimize or even eliminate inactive and unused hardware at your recovery site by concurrently running a test-development or batch program workload. This results in maximizing the use of IT assets.

As you can see in Table 1, virtual machines with VMware offer more flexibility through faster provisioning while maximizing server utilization—all for less cost.

Table 1: Comparison of traditional x86 server versus virtual machines with VMware.

Now that you understand the core components of VMware VI3, let's explore in more detail how these technologies compare to, and can improve, traditional recovery methods.