Chapter 10 - Disaster Recovery

Abstract

Disaster recovery simplifies backup and recover by providing an easy way to perform system-level backup and restoration. Virtualization also provides for a greater degree of hardware independence since the virtual machines are separated from the physical hardware by the virtualization technology that is being used. Consequently it is easy to move a virtual machine between different physical server hardware with little or no configuration or changes required on the virtual machine. In addition to facilitating and simplifying broad scale disaster recovery, virtualization can simplify the recovery of hardware failures—again largely due to the fact that the virtual machine is independent of the actual hardware in use. As long as another server is available to process the virtual machine files, the virtual machine can be quickly and easily brought back into operation. Finally, virtualization enables the ability to quickly and easily redistribute resources between datacenters providing the same degree of recovery that a dedicated DR site does, without the additional expenses and costs of a dedicated DR site.