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.

It's important to prepare your company before disaster strikes. Thus, seek out real-world business examples where businesses already have a plan in place where they'll benefit from using virtualization in a disaster recovery plan. Note how they compare with other methods, as well as their benefits and limitations. Most importantly, learn how virtualization enables businesses to recover from disasters, quickly, and then translate these methods to your own plan.

The most commonly used metrics or measures in planning for disaster migration are recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO)—both measure in hours and minutes. RPO measures how far the recovered data is out of synchronization with production data when a disaster occurs. RTO measures how quickly operations are restored.

When balancing the investment in disaster recovery against the risk of a disaster, there are always known and unknown concerns. Knowing where to draw the line to suspend operations is critical to the safety of your employees and potentially your business. That being said, ask yourself is it safe to resume business operations if:

• IT systems are restored with less than optimal performance?
• There is decreased failure tolerance?
• Data is partially complete?

Let's look at some of the more common recovery methods and how they compare with a recovery methodology that includes virtualization.

Backing up to tape

Backing up data to tape is the most used and understood method to save data for retrieval in the event of an outage. Files are backed up to tape on a file-by-file basis using rotating methodologies, such as:

• Full backup: All files are backed up.
• Incremental backup: Only those files that have been changed since the last backup are saved.
• Differential backup: Only those files that were changed since the last full backup are saved.

Once the backup occurs, to ensure they are kept safe, the tapes are typically stored at an offsite location.

While backing up to tape can be part of your overall business continuity plan, it shouldn't be the only method used. This method is not full-proof and doesn't take into consideration the amount of time to fully recover from tape. It is, however, effective for localized system outages, such as recovering from a bad disk drive, so it's perfectly acceptable to have this method as part of your overall business continuity plan.

Near line and online hot sites

This kind of recovery methodology assumes that there's a failover site available. The failover site needs to be equipped with network connections, physical security, power, and cooling. Basically, you need enough equipment to ensure that business operations can safely and efficiently resume in the event of a disaster.

Many businesses have invested in online sites as well as maintaining their own location. However, there are many third-party companies who sell failover sites as a disaster recovery service.

This solution enables a quick and fully efficient recovery in the event of a disaster, such as a hurricane or a flood.

This type of disaster recovery methodology is a viable approach. It doesn't require a complete system recovery like the continuous availability solution, which is up next.

Continuous availability

In this scenario, the concept is to balance workloads over many devices. Often times these devices, or platforms, are spread out over geographical areas. Each platform is provisioned such that if there's a disruption of any kind, there's spare capacity where the workload is transferred.

Provisioning platforms is the most viable business continuity strategy. A company's business operations are always online and continuous, even if there is a disruption or a disaster.

Virtualization

So if backup, hot site or continuous availability is appropriate for your business, why then should you incorporate virtualization? Because virtualization gives you real-time flexibility, security and confidence that all of your information is safe and that your business can keep operating as if all systems are normal in a time of need.

There are degrees of disaster tolerance that can be achieved through virtualization, from high availability/low disaster tolerance down to lower availability/high disaster tolerance. Many possible configurations can be deployed along this range. All of them leverage the capabilities and efficiencies of virtualization.

With virtualization, specifically with VMware VI3, high availability is inherent at several layers. Virtual machines are designed to leverage high availability capabilities in a physical server across every virtual machine on that server. Plus, virtualization doesn't lend itself to pain points associated with backup to tape, hot sites and continuous availability.

Fault-tolerant capabilities are frequently cost prohibitive for a server running a single application. However, they become cost effective when they are shared among many virtual machines.

Outages are limited to brief restarts in this environment. Furthermore, downtime and IT service disruption is minimized and the need for stand-by hardware and the installation of additional software is eliminated.

Virtualization along with Storage Area Network (SAN) and data replication provides the highest degree of protection, since information is stored and shared in multiple places.

If there's a server failure, all of the virtual machines on that server are re-launched on other virtual servers sharing in the resource pool. This high-availability approach to virtualization is the most fail-safe. However, as was mentioned earlier, virtual machines at the recovery site hosting failed over applications reduces the dependency on redundant hardware; therefore, reducing the costs. Whether your company requires high-availability or can operate just as efficiently and effectively under a different disaster recovery scenario, virtualization can cover your needs and reduce your costs.

Virtual infrastructure combined with array-based replication

When combining a virtual infrastructure with an array-based replication strategy, you're able to replicate the virtual machine to a secondary site without human intervention on any available virtual machine.

Without virtual machine support, the failover site would be required to maintain duplicate hardware and upgrades would need to occur at the failover site each time an upgrade occurred at the production site. This is cost-prohibitive for most businesses.

The hardware independence of virtual machines means that the equipment at the failover site doesn't need to match the production site hardware.

As you can see, virtualization can benefit your business continuity strategy and plan, while saving you time, money and IT resource effort. Now let's explore how a VMware server actually works.

There are a lot of options within the realm of VMware solutions. Learn about the major VMware components available and the technology you need to support a virtualization solution.

VMware ESX server

The VMware ESX server is the foundation for providing virtualization services. The ESX server abstracts memory, processor, storage and networking resources into many virtual machines. These abstracted virtual machines run next to one another on the same physical server.

Operating and capital costs are significantly reduced through the sharing of hardware resources across a number of virtual machines.

Applications that typically run on dedicated systems and servers can be migrated to separate virtual machines running on one single scalable system.

Now that you know about VMware ESX server's capabilities, let's move on to the hardware infrastructure you should consider for your business to fully support and leverage virtualization capabilities.

HP BladeSystem servers and storage

One of the biggest strategic decisions you'll make with respect to integrating virtualization into your business continuity approach is the design of your infrastructure. Designing an efficient infrastructure that maintains its integrity when you need it most is critical. Thus, the last thing you want to do is expend effort on developing a good strategy to save you time and money, only to spend the savings on unnecessary infrastructure.

Small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) need specific support when establishing a virtual environment. Thus, the HP BladeSystem focuses on:

• Creating an "infrastructure in a box"
• Reducing power consumption
• Creating a scalable architecture
• Hosting applications running on Windows®, Linux and HP-UX
• Supporting a combination of virtual machines, storage and server blades

When designing your infrastructure to support your business continuity plan, think through your servers, virtual machines, storage, tape, workstation and PC infrastructure and where blade technology will add value, while not breaking the bank.

It's important to determine where you can save money and how your infrastructure functions. Consider the following elements of the HP BladeSystem:

• Enclosures: Where will your infrastructure be housed, and which server blades are right for your business.
• Power and cooling: Select an infrastructure that can support a variety of environments and will save power and cooling through provisioning to meet demands.
• Networking and connectivity: Ensure that your solutions can support a wide range of networking switches.
• Management modules: Make sure that there are open interfaces to increase productivity.
• OS and applications: Ensure that your vendor is able to certify that their systems support multiple operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows, Netware, Linux, HP-UX, OpenVMS and Solaris and the applications that they run.
• Services: Select a solutions partner that can meet your service needs from planning through implementation and even through retirement of your equipment.

The HP BladeSystem infrastructure offers more flexibility and simplicity to build and manage both storage and servers in a single architecture. This infrastructure ensures that you'll:

• Reduce downtime.
• Increase administrator productivity and spend less time on setup and maintenance.
• Reduce server costs.
• Save power.
• Support your business as it grows.
• Generate less heat in harsh environments or in rooms with less air-conditioning capacity.

In the next few sections you'll learn about business continuity solutions leveraging virtualization.

Are you concerned about not having a disaster recovery solution? If so, how would you fund your disaster recovery solution?

Failover clustering

When clustering between a physical machine running mission critical applications with a similarly configured virtual machine, computing resources are not consumed by virtual machines when they are in stand-by mode. In addition, you can consolidate them into just a few physical platforms at a high consolidation ratio. These capabilities fully support a situation where 100 percent uptime is required. Consequently, there isn't a need to invest in multiple physical devices.

Virtual machines on SANS

When the requirement is to improve availability and eliminate single points of failure, a virtual infrastructure coupled with a SAN builds in an additional level of protection. When a virtual machine resides on a SAN, it's capable of surviving the crash of a server. Your administrator will simply restart the virtual machine on another virtual machine, which can be done automatically or manually, depending on your management software solution and implementation.

Virtualization implementation and integration isn't a quick or easy project, and knowing what to expect can be a key factor for success. This section helps you understand the key benefits of a virtualization IT strategy so you can establish success criteria for your implementation.

When developing your business continuity plan, it's important to develop some meaningful metrics and measures to ensure that your solution is providing value. The following message points should be considered when developing your plan:

• Increasing server utilization rates: One of your goals should be to maximize your server utilization rates. Determine your current rate and set a goal of 60–70 percent utilization of all of your servers.
• Provisioning times: When provisioning new applications, you should measure your time without a virtualization strategy and then the time it saves you with virtualization.
• Response times: Change requests will take less time with the employment of virtual machines.
• Server balancing: Your service levels should be optimized through the use of server resource pools and your ability to meet demands should improve.
• High availability: This is a key metric when virtualization is employed.
• Hardware independence: Much of your cost savings should be in this category. When building your business plan, measure the costs of maintaining duplicate servers in a secondary site versus deploying as needed with a virtual server strategy.
• Hardware consolidation: Measure the benefits of consolidating your hardware into a HP BladeSystem infrastructure.

By measuring these points and taking into consideration ease of configuration, ease of management, failover clustering and IT management and support savings, your business continuity plan should be easily justified and a streamlined implementation possible.

In summary

It's safe to say that disasters will occur, outages are the norm and your customers are expecting uninterrupted service. Implementation of a business continuity plan with virtualization will not only help you contain costs, but it will also provide an extra level of production support for your customers and keep them coming back.

This brief covered the key features and capabilities of a business continuity strategy with virtualization. In particular, you now know what a business continuity solution with virtualization is, how it compares to other recovery methods and how you can develop a robust business continuity plan incorporating virtualization technology.