Virtualization

Using hardware virtualization in a disaster recovery context has become almost main stream today.  There are three main ways in which companies use this technology in their DR planning.

 
Production Environment: In the production environment, some companies run their applications in virtual machines, and then use special migration tools to move applications to other virtual machines in case of hardware failure.

 
Disaster Recovery Environment: You may want to have a replica server for each of your eight critical application servers, but the cost of buying eight additional servers, and the cost of hosting those servers at a third party datacenter may be beyond your budget. Virtualization of your DR servers can help solve your problem.

Fast Recovery: You don’t do real time replication of your servers, but you do have a daily offsite backup.  If your production server fails, you want to be able to quickly pump your data into a virtual server that is already pre-loaded with your applications and hosted with your offsite backup provider.