It was just a few years ago when every organization wanted Disaster Recovery, and the few that had it only had “lip service” DR, which looks effective from the outside but is very unlikely to provide complete, or any, coverage if disaster strikes.  Now, thanks to virtualization, DR is accessible to most businesses.  But the challenge for today’s world is whether or not your solution matches your DR strategy.

In 2003 I was an IT consultant for a large retail company in New Zealand.  One of the projects I was involved in was to investigate full, wide-scale DR for their infrastructure.  After seeing the total costs for a physical DR solution - where you needed to match every server in the production data centre with an exact equivalent in the standby data centre – well not surprisingly they decided to postpone the project.  It was not too long ago when disaster recovery was restricted to companies with large budgets who could afford a solution.  With the emergence of virtualization we discovered that virtual machines are portable, encapsulated and hardware agnostic, making them flexible when it comes to DR.  The portability of virtual machines makes solutions for High Availability like vReplicator possible.

Also keep in mind that an effective DR strategy is much more than just choosing a solution and making sure your VMs are available at the remote site.  User access, Internet connections and communication between your servers and other sites are just as important.  No matter what software or hardware you use for your DR site, there should be much more involvement than choosing a solution and walking away.

The Vizioncore Systems Engineering team has collectively written a Best Practices Guide to cover how to best set up a DR site using vReplicator.  Additionally there is some excellent guidance on setting up a comprehensive DR solution in general.

Thanks for listening!  Feel free to comment below on your DR experiences.

-JK