Gateway to the Virtual World

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.

gateway security the to virtual world