High Availability And Disaster Recovery For Virtual Environments

By Dr. Vas Srinivasan

Virtualization is being increasingly used by IT departments for server consolidation and testing purposes. Virtual servers are used to reduce operational costs and to improve system efficiency. The growth in virtual servers has created challenges for IT departments regarding high availability and data protection. It is not enough to protect physical servers but also virtual servers as they contain business critical data and information. Virtual servers offer the flexibility, but at the same time if a single physical server containing multiple virtual servers fails, then impact of data loss is enormous.

Virtualization Benefits
Companies are adopting virtualization at a rapid speed because of the tremendous benefit it offers and some of them include:

• Server Consolidation – Virtualization helps to consolidate multiple servers into one single physical server thus offering improved operational performance.
• Reduced Hardware Costs – As the number of physical servers goes down, the cost of servers and associated costs like IT infrastructure, space etc. will also decrease tremendously.
• Improved Application Security – By having a separate application in each virtual machine, any vulnerability is segregated and it does not affect other applications.
• Reduced Maintenance – Since virtual servers can easily be relocated and migrated, maintenance of hardware and software can be done with minimal downtime.
• Enhanced Scalability – The ease with which virtual servers can be deployed will result in improved scalability of IT implementation.