Gateway to the Virtual World

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 security the to virtual world