Downloads

RSS

This document discusses how technologies from FalconStor Software and VMware work together to enable organizations to overcome these limitations and deliver application-consistent replication for automated DR in a virtual environment.

VMware Infrastructure 3 is the most advanced and commonly used enterprise server virtualization system for the x86 platform. As organizations become more familiar with server virtualization and the possibilities it enables, they have begun exploring replication to another virtualization server as a simpler and less expensive alternative to using traditional individual physical servers for DR and high availability. The portability provided by virtualization greatly simplifies restoration of replicated virtual machines, due to the elimination of hardware compatibility issues.

However, there are still complexities involved in virtual-to-virtual (V2V) DR. Coordinating the associations between storage volumes and virtual machines at the recovery site can be a complex and errorprone manual task. Furthermore, simple replication of virtual servers only provides "crash consistent" disk images akin to those of a system after a sudden power failure. Taking snapshots and replicating a LUN containing several virtual disks without the knowledge and cooperation of the operating systems and applications supported those disks can foster inconsistent file systems and loss of application integrity in databases and other applications. This makes recovery very difficult and laborious, as system administrators must engage consistency checks and at times even rebuild entire systems.