Virtualized Disaster Recovery from VMware and Vision Solutions Cost-efficient, dependable solutions for virtualized disaster recovery and business continuity
Cost-efficient, dependable solutions for virtualized disaster recovery and business continuity Vision Solutions and VMware technologies, when used together, can solve the challenge of providing disaster recovery for physical servers by combining virtualization, real-time data replication and application availability. Ensuring business-critical data and applications survive a site outage is paramount to the life of your business. But growing data volumes, complex applications and the cost of additional hardware, tools and training for a secondary location can make the insurance policy of an effective disaster recovery plan prohibitively expensive and hard to implement. Virtualization continues to gain widespread adoption in mainstream IT, and the benefits are evident - it allows businesses to improve their IT efficiency while continuing to drive down costs through consolidation. Virtualized disaster recovery infrastructure to match your production virtual infrastructure can extend these efficiencies to the DR plan, but is there a way to realize the benefits of a virtualized disaster recovery plan even for physical servers? Vision Solutions and VMware technologies, when used together, can solve the challenge of providing disaster recovery for physical servers by combining virtualization, real-time data replication and application availability. This combination of virtualization and advanced protection for both data and applications reduces cost and complexity while increasing the resilience of your recovery infrastructure. VMware vsphere 4 Disaster Recovery, Data Center Management and Optimization Suite VMware vsphere 4 is the next generation of industry-leading infrastructure virtualization software that virtualizes servers, storage and networking, allowing multiple unmodified operating systems and their applications to run independently in virtual machines while sharing physical resources. The suite delivers comprehensive virtualization, management, resource optimization, application availability and operational automation capabilities. vsphere 4 is the most widely deployed software suite for optimizing and managing IT environments through virtualization, from the desktop to the data center. vsphere 4 is proven to deliver results to more than 20,000 customers of all sizes, used in a wide variety of environments and applications that deliver transformative cost savings as well as increased operational efficiency, flexibility and IT service levels. For those that have production and recovery virtual environments with compatible storage systems supporting storage replication, VMware now offers the Site Recovery Manager product to fully automate the disaster recovery process normally documented in a DR run book. 2
Virtualization as a Recovery Solution for Physical Servers Recovery into a virtual environment avoids many of the error-prone and cumbersome steps of physical recovery. Over 80% of enterprises are engaged in virtualization projects, and the number of VMs in production roles continues to increase, yet the majority of production servers are still physical 1. There are reasons for this. Historically, the overhead from virtualization was not acceptable to key enterprise applications. Instead, many organizations have steadily built experience virtualizing less critical applications in preparation for the eventual virtualization of even performance-sensitive applications. Faster Recovery The performance of the vsphere hypervisor, ESX(i), has steadily improved over multiple product generations. The overhead of running most applications in a virtualized environment is now only between 2% and 10%. While that overhead may not yet be acceptable for every production application, organizations should carefully weigh the cost of duplicate physical resources against the benefits of a virtualized recovery environment that delivers 90% or greater of the original application performance. Recovery into a virtual environment avoids many of the error-prone and cumbersome steps of physical recovery. The speed and simplicity of provisioning virtual machines reduces recovery times by avoiding the need to get your hands dirty with hardware configurations and bare-metal restore processes. A Reduced Cost, Energy Efficient Recovery Environment Because a remote recovery environment may sit idle most of the time, the hardware and energy cost savings of a virtual environment are amplified for a recovery environment. Many customers of VMware vsphere 4 are able to consolidate 10 or more virtual machines per physical processor, drastically increasing server utilization and decreasing energy and physical space consumption. Disaster Recovery Testing They keys to a resilient recovery plan are flexibility and testing. The ease of provisioning new VMs and isolating those VMs in sandboxes is an advantage for testing recovery without interrupting users. 1 Enterprise Strategy Group : The Evolution of Server Virtualization, Nov 2010 3
Double-Take: Proven enterprise-class data protection that fits your mixed infrastructure and your budget Cross-Platform Virtualization Virtualization platforms provide tools to virtualize physical servers, but a virtualized recovery solution must be able to continually protect servers and then virtualize them after they ve already failed. Perhaps more importantly, the solution must be able to recover back to physical environments when the outage is over. The suite of Double-Take failover and recovery products goes beyond one-way virtualization to provide true any-to-any platform recovery. Physical or virtual servers can be recovered to new VMs in your VMware recovery environment, and then recovered back to physical or virtual machines on other platforms as needed. Virtual Failover and Recovery Designed for vsphere Because the virtualization process is designed for vsphere, a new VM is automatically provisioned to match the original source at failover time, with no user effort to create it. But if the physical server had too much unused capacity, the new virtual machine can be adjusted to better match the needs of the application. The size of the virtual disks, the number of virtual CPUs, and the amount of RAM allocated to the failed over VM can all be easily adjusted at failover time. Real-Time Replication Rather than backing up data nightly during a disruptive backup window and risking up to 24 hours of changes, Double-Take replicates changes in real-time, without interrupting users. Changes are captured, compressed, and transmitted over IP networks of any distance for efficient, continuous protection. Unlike replication built into many storage systems, Double-Take captures changes at the byte level, rather than the block level, further reducing the amount of bandwidth needed to protect data. Real-time replication enables recovery back to the minutes before the disaster, and lets you failover to the virtual recovery site in minutes. Hardware and Software Independent Double-Take is application independent, allowing you to protect almost any application and upgrade that application without affecting the ongoing protection. Patented Double-Take replication technology replicates changes at the file system level and works regardless of what application is making changes to protected files. This means Double-Take can protect any application data including Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, or any another Windows-based application. Hardware-based replication is often proprietary for each storage vendor and provides no crossvendor replication; Double-Take has no dependency on any hardware or storage provider or storage architecture (SCSI, FibreChannel, iscsi). This independence allows Double-Take to be used on existing heterogeneous storage infrastructures and does not lock you in to a specific vendor for future purchases. 4
Streamlined Management Interface Double-Take provides an interface that is easy to use to ensure you can quickly and easily protect your data and applications. The Double-Take Availability UI automatically discovers servers running Double-Take Availability and displays them in a single window. Managing the entire Double-Take Availability deployment can be performed from this single console. Any transfers, reports, failovers, and/or failbacks can be viewed from this single point. Consolidation Savings Because Double-Take has designed solutions specifically for vsphere, a one-to-one pairing of production systems with disaster recovery systems is no longer required. By leveraging a single target virtual machine as a helper to access storage on the target host, many-to-one virtual failover configurations are possible, unlocking the value of virtualized recovery. Automated Failover with Double-Take Availability Double-Take Availability constantly monitors essential applications and servers for failure, and can automate the failover process to ensure compliance with even aggressive recovery time objectives (RTOs). Real-Time replication combined with failover monitoring for customer-facing systems minimizes the impact to business operations and ensures that you recover from the time the failure occurred, not from when the last backup was taken, which can result in a day or more of lost data and productivity. Flexible Recovery with Double-Take RecoverNow Double-Take RecoverNow is designed to protect data on many production servers to a consolidated repository server using the same real-time replication as Double-Take Availability. From the repository server, RecoverNow offers the ability to recover files, folders, applications or even entire servers from any point in time using true Continuous Data Protection (CDP) technology. That data can be recovered to the original server, new hardware, or to a virtual environment. Double-Take and VMware With Double-Take products from Vision Solutions as the bridge between physical infrastructure and a virtual recovery environment, affordable and efficient disaster recovery is within reach. Thousands of companies including more than half of Fortune 500 corporations already protect their data and applications with Double-Take products. 15300 Barranca Parkway Irvine, CA 92618 800-957-4511 801-799-0300 Copyright 2010, Vision Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. IBM and Power Systems are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.