Protecting a Virtualized Data Center with VMware and Dell

EqualLogic SAN arrays and vCenter Site Recovery Manager can bring peace of mind to small and mediumsized companies concerned about disaster recovery.
Its a given that every organization must have a solid business continuity and disaster recovery plan, should data access go offline for any reason. Such plans have been around since the first bit of data was processed by the first computer. Still, small and medium-sized businesses historically havent tended to that requirement as well as they might. Doing business continuity and disaster recovery correctly means making a strong commitment to technology and processes, including updating and validating your strategy often. Thats a lot harder than it sounds, and its one of the primary reasons business continuity and disaster recovery have gotten short shrift among small and medium-sized businesses if not large enterprises, as well.

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recovery testing scenarios, companies rarely bring up the entire infrastructure required to support an application, says Andy Nichols, an Enterprise Technologist at Dell. For one, bringing up a test environment that corresponds one-for-one with the production infrastructure is cost-prohibitive for most companies. Secondly, disaster recovery often comes in the form of point solutions tied to hardware, the operating system or application. The greater number of such point solutions a company has in place, the more complex disaster recovery becomes. Nichols points out another problem: A lot of the point solutions dont vary over time. Theyre not necessarily scalable to reflect demand changes in scope or complexity. However, several factors have encouraged small and medium-sized businesses to rethink their plan-it-andshelf-it strategy for business continuity and disaster recovery. These include technology maturity and cost reductions, with solutions trickling down from large enterprises to smaller companies, increased awareness in the wake of disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and 9/11, as well as an increased regulatory compliance requirement. But perhaps the biggest game-changer for small and medium-sized businesses planning for business continuity and disaster recovery has been the arrival of new enabling technology server virtualization, which allows a logical, rather than physical, view of resources. Newfound business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities can come none too soon for small and mediumsized businesses. IT executives face increasing pressure to keep the business operational, with the cost of downtime now averaging roughly $1.5 million per hour across major sectors, according to industry analysis. As downtime continues to rise, companies are seeking

to lower their recovery-time objectives (RTO), with many specifying the business be back up and running in less than 12 hours. This compares to RTOs of more than 24 hours that were commonplace not so long ago.

Building Sound Business Continuity

As small and medium-sized companies consider how best to institute truly workable business continuity and disaster recovery plans, they must take a bottoms-up approach. Look at your stack from the bottom up, from the hardware up through the application to the services, Nichols advises. To be effective, a business continuity plan must meet these four requirements, he says. They must: Be built on a reliable platform. Modern, highly capable hardware platforms can eliminate single points of failure within the server, network and storage infrastructures as well as across the data center fabric. These platforms arent reliant on the operating system or arbitrary drivers. Be independent of physical infrastructure, as enabled by virtualization. Once services, applications and operating systems are placed within virtual machines, they lose their dependence on a physical host and so can flow from one to another for business continuity and disaster recovery purposes. Provide protection across operating systems and applications. When problems arise within the application and OS bond, they can be difficult to engineer out, making application- and OSindependent protection an imperative. Provide protection against a broad spectrum of downtime causes. A sound business continuity and disaster recovery plan must account for

In a recent quick poll taken during a joint Dell and VMware Webcast for small and medium-sized businesses on how to protect a virtualized data center, less than one-third of respondents said they felt their business continuity and disaster recovery plans were just right and that they wouldnt change a thing about them. Twice that number of participants 57 percent said their business continuity and disaster recovery plans suffer from insufficient testing while 29% also said current plans poorly matched the goals or requirements and were too complex (multiple responses allowed). Ive talked to quite a few customers and a lot of them have a plan but they put it in a book, and they put it on the shelf and pray that they dont have to use that plan. They just dont have the cycles, the expertise and the time to test it, says Bill Henderson, Staff Systems Engineer at VMware. They almost treat it simply as a checklist item for the auditors. When testing does occur, IT often limits the focus to a certain application, be it e-mail, a database or some other business-critical asset, rather than on all IT services. Moreover, in typical business continuity and disaster

White Paper: Protecting a Virtualized Data Center with VMware and Dell

planned and unplanned downtime as well as protect against component, server, data and site failures. Virtualization eases this challenge, even for planned downtime, Henderson notes. In the past youd have to schedule your whole system to go down Sunday night at midnight and get it back up by 8 oclock in the morning. With virtualization technology, youre able to take action in the middle of the day without any downtime to your servers or your users, he says. Of course, sound business continuity and disaster recovery also requires a solid testing program. Importantly, the test must be more than just a point validation of a specific application as is traditional. People really need to go through the exercise of actually recovering as opposed to playing a game or saying, We think its going to turn out this way because inevitably when people do that, there are some things that are unexpected, Nichols says. Companies must also commit to testing their plans once yearly, at a bare minimum. To that point, results from the Webcast quick poll arent encouraging. In that poll, 25 percent of respondents said they never test their business continuity and disaster recovery plans while another quarter of the respondents indicate they test less than once a year. While 37.5 percent of participants said they do test at least once a year, only 12.5 percent hit the more optimal target of twice or more yearly. Fortunately, virtualization can help get companies in line with testing best practices, too. For example, some companies using virtualization for business continuity and disaster recovery purposes test their plans, or at least parts of them, continuously, Nichols says. One of the advantages of virtu-

As small and medium-sized companies consider how best to institute truly workable business continuity and disaster recovery plans, they must take a bottoms-up approach.

alization is that you can go through an entire disaster recovery plan and, using virtualization toolsets, bring up the environment at your disaster recovery site without affecting your business processes at your production site, he explains. You can bring it up out-ofband, so its isolated from the network, but its still a true-and-valid test that ensures that your plan, your processes and your toolsets work.

strike, IT can quickly scale out the recovery infrastructure as demand requires. Resource pooling. Virtualization allows on-the-fly sharing and allocation of hardware resources, including those required for disaster recovery testing and automated resource optimization. You dont have to have like sets of hardware in your production and disaster recovery sites. You can mix and match, and even use that secondary site for quality assurance testing or development. When a disaster does occur, you can quickly suspend those processes and then reassign that hardware for the disaster recovery solution, Henderson says. No wonder, then, that many small and medium-sized companies are actively considering virtualizing their business continuity and disaster recovery implementations. Their reasons do vary, however, as results from another Webcast quick poll reveal. Not surprisingly, a need to reduce spending on recovery hardware is motivating more than half of respondents, 57.1 percent, to consider virtualization for their business continuity and disaster recovery plans. Another 42.8 percent (multiple responses allowed) each said they were leaning toward virtualization because their current implementations are outmoded and they are striving for better manageability.

The Value of Virtualization

Virtualization offers several key features that make it well-suited for disaster recovery. They are: Hardware independence. IT organizations can reliably recover virtual machines to any hardware, including physical hosts located at a recovery site. Encapsulation. When encapsulated, a virtual machine becomes a file just like any other, and all the information about a system is stored as data on a disk. Using data protection tools, an IT organization can protect entire systems. Partitioning and consolidation. Multiple virtual machines can run on the same physical hardware, which means reduced hardware requirements at production and disaster recovery sites. Because scaling is a nonissue with virtualization, IT can use fairly high physical-to-virtual consolidation ratios at the recovery site. Should disaster

White Paper: Protecting a Virtualized Data Center with VMware and Dell

Especially with small and mediumsized businesses in mind, the joint Dell and VMware goal has been to improve the overall simplicity of business continuity and disaster recovery.

as well as failover between two sites with active workloads. Multiple sites can even recover into a single shared recovery site. In addition, SRM can help with planned data center failovers such as data center migrations. IT managers can further streamline disaster recovery management and enable automation via an EqualLogic storage adapter for SRM. With the adapter, the EqualLogic auto-replication tool coordinates directly with SRM Server. Dell OpenManage plug-in tabs in vCenter. IT managers can monitor and manage not only their virtual environments but also their Dell physical infrastructure from within vCenter for reduced complexity. Especially with small and mediumsized businesses in mind, the joint Dell and VMware goal has been to improve the overall simplicity of business continuity and disaster recovery. In the past, managing a disaster recovery solution would require lots of time and expertise on many different software, imaging and application management tools. Now, with vCenter and the plug-in from Dell OpenManage, you get a single pane of glass where you only have to use one or two tools to manage your entire disaster recovery solution, Henderson says. Peace of mind is in the offing. You can be assured that your business critical data can be protected, Henderson concludes. Disaster does occur and companies do fail, especially small companies, from those disasters. VMware and Dell disaster recovery solutions provide a great value when it comes to supporting all types of customers and small and mediumsized companies particularly. n

Better manageability is indeed one of the key paybacks of virtualizing disaster recovery and that begins with having centralized storage. With a storage area network (SAN) in place, recovery options grow. Key virtualization-related recovery features enabled by network storage include server-less backup independent of production servers; integrated SAN-based replication for disaster recovery; and scalable online backup and recovery via SAN-based snapshots of virtual datasets. With a SAN also comes the ability to move running virtualized workloads without interruption; the ability to balance workloads for optimized resource usage given current workloads; and high availability, with the ability to re-host and restart virtual machines in case of server failure. Such mobility is critical for easing the pains imposed by traditional hardware-bound business continuity and disaster recovery plans. As IT executives evaluate cost considerations for virtualizing their business continuity and disaster recovery implementations, they best not forget to factor in the productivity gains and operational expense reductions enabled by such quick-and-easy SAN recovery, Henderson advises. If youre sitting around waiting for tapes to spin, thats costly, especially compared to reverting back from a snapshot, for full-site recovery. Theres a lot of time savings there, a lot of productivity gains to be taken into account when youre building

your disaster recovery solutions. Importantly, these recovery tools must not be managed as point solutions but integrated into the overall management infrastructure, Nichols says. Plug-ins are available and quite prevalent, which makes the value of these solutions tremendously better and a lot easier to implement. Here, for example, is an overview of Dell and VMware products and how they work together to create sound business continuity and disaster recovery implementations today: Dell EqualLogic SAN arrays, for centralized storage. Dells EqualLogic PS Series SAN arrays offer several critical features for data protection and recovery scenarios. For example, they feature fully redundant and hot swappable hardware for failover, multipathing and RAID protection; SAN-based data copy facilities via snapshots, clones and replicas; and integration of SAN data copy with servers and applications for backup-and-restore processes, quick recovery and disaster protection and recovery. VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM), for ease of recoverability. With SRM, VMware delivers advanced capabilities for disaster recovery management, non-disruptive testing and automated failover. SRM can manage failover from production data centers to disaster recovery sites,

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White Paper: Protecting a Virtualized Data Center with VMware and Dell