Why does virtualisation help disaster recovery?

11-08-2009

In a standard disaster recovery environment, you have a primary data centre and another location, with copies of your physical hardware, for site disaster recovery. If the hardware isn't the same at the two locations, you may have driver incompatibilities and problems restoring your backups.

With virtualisation, your "hardware" is all virtual and completely separated from the actual, physical hardware in the host server. This separation means it's much easier to take a virtual machine (VM) and restore it to different hardware.

Another factor with virtualisation is that you simply have fewer machines to worry about. If you go from 50 physical machines to 10 virtual servers, you've reduced the number of restorations you have to do by 80 percent.

Most virtual platforms, including Hyper-V, support the Microsoft VSS backup approach. This approach means that you only need to back up the host using VSS, and all the host's VMs are backed up as well. Your VMs are notified of the VSS backup and ensure the data on disk is in a consistent state.

You should make sure your plan for recovery is sound when using virtualisation. You should consider our ProBak online backup service.