Business continuity with VMware
Achieving business continuity through traditional methods of backup, disaster recovery and high availability can be expensive, complex, slow and time consuming. Find out how VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 is transforming the way organisations approach planned and unplanned downtime.
Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3) sets the new standard in virtual backup solutions for the 3 key business continuity areas:
- Planned downtime
- Unplanned downtime: Site-level interruption
- Unplanned downtime: Equipment-level interruption
The very nature of VMware's virtualisation technology enables organisations to manage planned downtime with minimum disruption to end users and gives IT departments the ability to respond to unplanned downtime quickly and with greater flexibility.
VI3 can:
- Reduce downtime
- Improve responsiveness and flexibility
- Lower costs of business continuity plans
- Provide High Availability for applications with standard server hardware
- Simplify your organisation's business continuity infrastructure
VI3 Core Properties
To appreciate how VMware can transform the way your organisation can achieve business continuity it is important to understand the core properties of VI3:
- Partitioning
- Hardware Independence
- Encapsulation
- Isolation
Partitioning
Partitioning enables consolidation of multiple applications and operating systems on the same server, which drives up server utilisation and in turn lowers capital costs and provides significant operational savings.
VMware ESX Server virtualises server storage and networking, allowing multiple applications to run in virtual machines on the same physical server.
Hardware Independence
VMware virtual machines are hardware independent and can run on any x86 hardware without requiring any changes or modifications. This property significantly accelerates recovery by simplifying system startup and configuration (for recovery) at the disaster recovery site.
Encapsulation
The ability to clone and encapsulate Virtual Machines means that an entire server – operating system image, application, data, configurations and state – can all be stored as a file to disk. This encapsulation property transforms and simplifies tasks such as server migration, backup and recovery, replication and disaster recovery server provisioning. These tasks can instead be treated as a simple data migration, file copy or file export activity.
Isolation
Changes or instability in one virtual machine are completely isolated from other virtual machines on the same host. In a VMware Infrastructure environment, you can run disaster recovery tests on the actual disaster recovery hardware without impacting the ability to recover production virtual machines if your production site fails during a disaster recovery test.
Tight isolation between virtual machines delivers application stability for multiple workloads and reduces security vulnerabilities.
VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 is transforming the way IT Departments respond to the demands and pressures put on their systems and personnel. VI3 facilitates increased flexibility, enables faster response times through simplified management, reduces possible downtime and reduces the operational costs associated with traditional methods.
VMotion, DRS and High Availability
VMware's VMotion, DRS and High Availability are unique VMware technologies that help facilitate and enhance business continuity.
Find out more about VMware's VMotion, DRS and High Availability features.
For more information about VI3 call us today on +44 (0)20 8786 1500 or email tellmemore@bytes.co.uk.
