Business Continuity Solutions

Virtualizing your infrastructure helps overcome the inhibitors we saw earlier. Virtualization can help increase infrastructure utilization, lower operational costs and reduce complexity. It can also make it easier to manage variations in application workloads by creating virtual machines and application instances that can be automatically migrated across virtual machines. This automation can lower your operational overhead, significantly reducing application downtime and improving your service levels.

What are the benefits of Virtualization for Business Continuity?

• VMware Infrastructure Enterprise: The most significant solution DSI can provide as a solution for its virtualization business continuity is "VMware Infrastructure Enterprise", addressing all the types of downtime mentioned earlier. To top that, VMware also works hard to build technology into the products to enhance data integrity.
• Cost Saves: Basing your Business Continuity strategy on VMware Infrastructure helps save money for the organization. With the ability to have multiple virtual machines on a single physical server, VMware reduces investment costs in multiple servers. Reducing the server population also immediately results in lower Total Costs because of lower power and cooling requirements, facilities requirements, wiring and networking elements, and savings on hardware maintenance.
• Zero downtime maintenance: Through the use of VMware VMotion technology, the days of bringing applications down because of scheduled server maintenance are over. Instead, IT organizations use VMware VMotion to migrate running applications from a server they wish to take down to a backup server. With all applications moved off a server without disruption, it can be maintained or even replaced without any impact on service delivery.
• Recovery Procedure: If the recovery time objective for recovery to the state of the last full backup is under one hour, the only successful recovery strategy is to maintain a secondary data center equipped with the same model hardware as the primary data center, server for server. When the secondary data center is virtualized, there are three immediate benefits:
• There is no need to maintain the same model hardware because IT managers can restore applications encapsulated into virtual machines to any x86 architecture hardware, and they don't need to license specialized bare metal restore tools
• IT can pool together all the data center hardware and realize economy of scale benefits
• IT managers only have to manage a single type of data-encapsulated virtual machines-for capture and recovery. This approach drastically simplifies management complexity compared to the traditional approach of having to deal with disparate systems, applications, and data
• VMware Site Recovery Manager: Disaster recovery can be safeguarded one step further by automating the recovery process with VMware Site Recovery Manager. Although not a part of VMware Infrastructure, Site Recovery Manager works in tandem with VMware Infrastructure to manage and automate disaster recovery for virtual environments. Not only does it automate the disaster recovery process, Site Recovery Manager also enables easy and cost- effective testing of the disaster recovery plans to ensure they are reliable and affordable.
• Dynamic resource sharing: Because VMware Infrastructure virtualizes disk drives as flat files, these files can be moved from server to server to optimize utilization levels and to manage service levels. Through VMware Infrastructure's resource management capabilities, Resource allocation is achieved to manage complimentary applications on the same server. For better dynamic resource management, VMware VMotion technology can dynamically migrate running environments between servers, providing IT organizations an edge to respond to workload fluctuations in real time.

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Are there any other stand-out advantages to Business continuity solutions?

• Immediate provisioning: When IT organizations standardize on an operating system and a specific set of patches, they can create virtual disk image, and deploy virtual servers simply by making new copies of the disk image files.
• Eliminating vendor-imposed upgrade cycles: VMware Infrastructure virtualizes the hardware itself, including the processor, memory, disk, and Input/Output resources. The vendor-imposed hardware and software upgrade cycles are eliminated as the hardware that the operating system sees is virtual and not physical, and hence, the OS and the software installed on it can be moved from server to server without concern for the underlying platform.
• Gathering hardware resources: VMware Infrastructure virtualizes hardware resources. This software allows administrators to create virtual network devices that pass network traffic between guest operating systems without the expense associated with switch hardware.
• Supporting legacy operating systems: VMware Infrastructure provides guest operating systems with virtual servers they expect to see, including obsolete hardware required by operating systems such as Microsoft Windows NT. With VMware Converter, IT organizations can migrate entire environments from physical servers whose service plans have expired to virtual machines running on state-of-the-art servers. This helps address performance, pace, power, and cooling concerns by supporting multiple environments per server.
• Business continuity and backups: With operating systems and applications encapsulated into disk files, they can be backed up as a complete unit, and they can be migrated to a secondary datacenter, ready to activate in the event of a failure at the primary location.

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Does VMware cater to unplanned failure situations?

• In case of server failure, VMware HA automatically restarts virtual machines on another physical host. This triggers the recovery server to come from any server in the same resource pool with sufficient capacity, thus keeping no standby hardware dedicated for server failure. This uses servers for productive purposes and not just in the event of a server failure. Most importantly, this solution is easy to implement and can be applied to all workloads in the VMware Infrastructure, quite unlike the cost and complexity of clustering.
• We provide Clustering software that works in a virtualized environment supporting uninterrupted application-level failure. We can also set up a clustered application on a physical server to failover to a virtualized server as long as the clustered application has also been made a part of the virtual machine on the recovery site.
• VMware supports high availability of other component failures as well. With the ability to pool NICs and HBAs, a single point of failure in network or storage paths is not an issue and the traffic is routed to remaining available paths.
• VMware also handles resource bottlenecks, dynamically adjusting workloads.
• Business continuity and backups: With operating systems and applications encapsulated into disk files, they can be backed up as a complete unit, and they can be migrated to a secondary datacenter, ready to activate in the event of a failure at the primary location.

Thus, to sum this up, we can say that VMware's Business Continuity solution is rapid, affordable, and reliable.

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