Virtualization is one of the hottest technologies in today’s datacenters, and it’s about to take a giant leap forward.  Until recently, enterprises had been using virtualization almost exclusively for test and development, but according to a recent InformationWeek survey, more than half of the companies using virtualization have started to deploy it in their production environments, thanks to improvements in technology from leading vendors like VMwareTM.  

“Virtualization is on the brink of a paradigm shift, which will fundamentally change IT as we know it over the next couple of years,” says Jimmy Pike, director of Systems Architecture, Data Center Solutions, at Dell. “Enterprises are looking to virtualization to foster server consolidation, to enable high availability and disaster recovery.”

As enterprises move to virtualize their production systems, they are looking to achieve more than cost savings from deploying fewer physical machines. They also want to gain new benefits in managing their infrastructure, applications and data.  Virtualization offers real advantages in backup and recovery, but the traditional approach of using a backup agent for each virtual machine (VM) can demand a lot of resource overhead—especially when six or 10 virtual machines are running on a single physical server. New technologies like VMware Consolidated Backup, which leverages a backup proxy, are greatly simplifying backup and recovery on virtual machines.

Whether a company uses extensive physical platforms or virtual machines, it needs to protect its production-level data and applications. In a virtual environment, where fewer physical machines are running applications or hosting data, it’s more critical than ever that robust backup and recovery procedures are in place. If your virtual machines can’t get the data needed for that workload, all the benefits of virtualization are lost.

Here are some steps that enterprises can take to ensure data protection when they move virtualization to their production environments:

• Protect your virtual machines like you do your physical machines, with a backup and recovery scenario for all production-level applications and their data.  For each application, determine the Recovery Point Objective (RPO), the point in time to which any lost or corrupted data needs to be restored, and Recovery Time Objective (RTO), the amount of time needed to complete a recovery. Base the RPO and RTO on the application’s requirements and service level agreements (SLAs).
  
  Technologies like replication, Continuous Data Protection (CDP), and application environment clustering are enabling enterprises to achieve much better RPOs and RTOs, and enhance disaster recovery because virtual machines contain both data and system state information in a single disk file.
  
  
• Protect the hypervisor like you do a physical machine’s operating system.  The virtual machine’s disk files (VMDK for VMware) are critical for disaster recovery, since the entire server environment is encapsulated in this file.  Also, protect the VMware service console.  If you use VMware Consolidated Backup technology, that service console becomes even more important.
  
  
• Store backups of hypervisors and VMs at an offsite disaster recovery location.  Virtualization enables enterprises to have a robust disaster recovery solution that they may not  have had access to previously. Older servers and storage systems can be redeployed at disaster recovery sites to deliver recovery capabilities without having to replicate the physical environment.  Make sure to have backups of any virtualized production systems offsite as well.
  
  
• Protect both application and file data on physical servers to virtual machines in a DR location.  Traditionally, there have been three levels of data protection—the file system, application and physical levels.  While most recoveries are done at the file system and application levels, it is important to protect virtualized data at the physical level by capturing an image of the VM’s disk files (VMDK). VMware’s Consolidated Backup solution goes beyond the three levels of protection by taking a snapshot of the VMDK file and sending that image across a storage area network (SAN) to an off-host backup server, which reads the snapshot as if it is reading the actual file system.  This capability is a one-step restore process, greatly simplifying individual file recovery.
  
  
• Protect “gold” copies of approved, patched versions of operating system and applications. As enterprises install patches and upgrades to their operating systems and applications, they stabilize their infrastructure.  Once you have a build that performs well, consider it a template and create it on your VM.  If you lose your template, you’ve lost your “gold” copy. So protect those templates.
  

 Dell helps virtualize and protect your data

Dell is a leader in helping enterprises take advantage of virtualization.  Dell is working with hardware industry partners AMD, Intel, EMC, and software virtualization leaders VMware, Microsoft, Red Hat, Novell, Symantec, and Altiris to help drive the evolution of virtualization standards. Dell is expanding its partnerships to include CommVault, Double-Take Software, PlateSpin, Platform Computing, and vizioncore to offer wider choice and flexibility, while maintaining the focus on standards. 

Dell tests, integrates and supports server Virtualization Solutions that include virtualization software from partners VMware and Microsoft in a variety of configurations. Dell plans to test and support open-source Xen configurations when available from Red Hat and Novell SuSE.  Dell’s validated virtualization configurations result from rigorous testing of all server, storage and software components to ensure a comprehensive Virtualization Solution suited to your business needs.

To help you make sense of the complexity, Dell provides a range of design and deployment services to enable your business to avoid data loss and minimize downtime. With Dell’s support you can create a virtualized, scalable data infrastructure with the archiving, backup and recovery solution that’s right for your business.