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Staging A Disaster Recovery VM

Thursday, 04 January 2007 by Michel Roth

Although many organizations have embraced server virtualization, many remain clueless on how to prepare virtualized server resources for a disaster. In this tip, we'll look at some of the issues you need to consider for disaster planning with your virtual machines.

A key benefit of running production servers inside virtual machines is the portability of the VM's virtual hardware emulation. If one of your production Dell servers that hosts a VM crashes, for example, the VM can be redeployed on an HP server in order to resume operations. The VM's host system hardware is different, but the emulated hardware seen by the virtual machine would remain the same.

Of course, this is assuming that you are currently running a virtualization engine that provides full hardware emulation. VMware and Microsoft Virtual Server both offer this level of portability. Hypervisor-based virtual machines improve VM performance by allowing virtual machines to run on the bare metal. This improves performance but presents additional challenges for restoring VMs to a host with a different hardware platform.

I'll get to those issues later. First, let's look at the general steps involved in prepping a generic disaster recovery VM.

Read the entire article at source, SearchServerVirtualization.