Pat Hanavan, Vice President, Product Management, Data & Systems Management Group.
Virtualisation is here to stay, and for good reason. Today’s IT organisations face a multitude of challenges that virtualisation addresses. From controlling server sprawl to increasing operational efficiency and easing disaster recovery, virtualisation clearly delivers bottom-line results.
What isn’t so clear is how to get there. Making the transition from physical-to-virtual (P2V) is just the beginning. Many organisations must also move from a virtual environment back to a physical one. While tools are often provided by virtualisation vendors to help their customers do P2V conversion, virtual-to-physical (V2P) conversion can be difficult.
But for a growing number of organisations, the most flexible conversion options can be found in system protection solutions. Although these software products are designed primarily to enable rapid recovery to dissimilar hardware in the event of a disaster, they also significantly streamline P2V and V2P conversions.
The Fast Track to P2V
Regardless of the conversion tool used, moving an existing physical system to a virtual one requires taking an operating system and everything that resides on it—from applications to data, settings, and more—and abstracting it from the physical hardware. As a result, the operating environment changes from one that runs directly off physical hardware to one that runs on virtual hardware.
There are a variety of reasons for converting physical systems to virtual systems. Hardware can be used more efficiently by hosting multiple virtual server environments on one physical server. In the wake of a disaster, there may not be sufficient hardware to restore every system to its own device. And, virtual systems can be used as a test bed for change management to make sure that changes do not negatively impact physical production systems.
Some virtualisation software providers offer their own conversion tools for making this transition, helping their customers take advantage of the powerful technology that drives business value and meets operational efficiency objectives.
So do a growing number of system protection solutions. These solutions offer integrated virtual conversion tools that allow the conversion of a recovery point to one of today’s popular virtual environments, typically VMware Virtual Disk (VMDK) or Microsoft Virtual Disk (VHD). Unlike other more traditional offerings, these solutions provide a wizard-driven interface to make conversion easy and intuitive.
For example, a typical conversion involves first capturing a system recovery point, then selecting the desired virtual disk format and a folder in which to place the virtual disk image. For VMDK conversions, the virtual disk file can be split into smaller files to enable the virtual disk to be copied to a FAT32 drive or to a DVD. These solutions also enable a seamless transfer of the VMDK files to VMware ESX servers, giving organisations greater flexibility in managing virtual conversions.
What’s more, with these complete solutions, converting from a physical to a virtual environment is fast. In fact, some require only a fraction of the time of conventional virtualisation software offerings. As a result, a conversion that might typically take two hours is reduced to 15 minutes.
The reason? The most advanced of these system protection solutions leverage powerful image capture technologies that are highly efficient with disk and resource I/O. By performing a linear copy of only the sectors on the system that contain data, these engines are very agile and quick.
There and Back Again
One of the most valuable capabilities of newer system protection solutions is that they also enable V2P conversion. This is critical for organisations whose conversion to a virtual environment is temporary and, when hardware is repaired or replaced, must return to a physical environment.
V2P is also essential when a virtual environment is used for preflight testing of patches, application installations, configuration changes, or driver updates before those changes are applied to production systems. V2P capabilities enable organisations to build a system and benchmark it offline in a virtual environment before bringing it online in a physical one.
The process of recovering a virtual environment to a physical one, V2P is also made possible with system protection solutions. A recovery point is created on the virtual system, loaded onto recovery media, and a recovery CD is booted on the new hardware. Storage devices are detected, networking services are automatically loaded, and the image is restored. Once the image is restored, the post-restore process automatically loads new critical drivers required for that virtual system to function on the physical system. With drivers in place, the system is ready to reboot, reconnect to the network and be up and running.
Better yet, like P2V conversion using system protection solutions, V2P conversion is extremely fast, with some solutions providing 1 to 3GB a minute conversion time.
Complementary Strategies
While more and more organisations consider adopting a virtualisation strategy, disaster recovery has become nothing short of mandatory. After all, hardware failure is inevitable. Systems wear out and must be replaced. Accidents happen. So do power outages, natural disasters, and malicious threats. Yet, downtime is unacceptable.
Consequently, organisations must be able to recover from such occurrences in minutes rather than hours or days. However, even in rare situations in which duplicate hardware is in place, meeting such demanding recovery time objectives is problematic at best.
By leveraging hardware-independent system protection solutions that support a variety of virtual conversion options, organisations can complement their disaster recovery strategy with a robust virtualisation strategy that safeguards business continuity and provides a more efficient IT infrastructure.
With these solutions, it makes no difference to which hardware a downed device is restored. By obviating the hardware incompatibility issues that continue to plague traditional layered restoration approaches, these solutions make quick work of recovering an entire site.
And, since they also enable the conversion from a physical environment to a virtual one, and back again, today’s more advanced system protection solutions represent a cost-effective approach to both disaster recovery and virtualisation. They can even be used to convert from one vendor’s virtualisation platform to another, or from a single
vendor’s more lightweight platform to its more robust one.
Ultimately, the greatest benefit of today’s next-generation system protection solutions is that they offer organisations another choice for meeting their business objectives. By providing powerful recovery capabilities along with flexible restoration options and inclusive conversion capabilities, these solutions help deliver on the promises of a virtual world.
Gateway to the Virtual World
By
Staff Writers
on Apr 30, 2008 11:37AM

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