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The hottest thing in data centers right now is virtualization. The new technology enables you to run several operating systems within a single physical environment, giving you essentially two or more servers in one. Why should you go to virtualization? The standard way for data processing was one application, one server. This way, you made sure your applications ran in a clean environment, and one application didn’t impact another. If a problem developed, it was easy to debug and fix. This works fine except for the fact that with today’s modern computers, you end up using a small amount of a server’s capacity. In addition, a company has the challenge to create new ways to store 50 percent or more data each year, meaning that data centers are taking up a larger and larger footprint. Not only are there larger footprints. The cost of these footprints in the data center has increased. More cooling and more electricity far overshadow the cost of increased hardware. More hardware adds additional hassle and additional expense with maintenance and additional software and storage costs for maintaining a backup and recovery plan. Enter the virtual machine. There are many advantages of virtualization. It enables the reduction of the storage space needed to rack mount servers in your data center. In addition additional savings can be realized on power and cooling costs. Maintenance and deployment is easier on virtual servers. You can forget the hassle of ordering a new server, unbox it, mount it on a rack, attach it to a power supply and hook it up to the network, provide cooling, and install the OS. I think you get the picture. A virtual server is just a file on a disk, once it is provisioned; all that remains is to clone your existing system. According to estimates by many IT research groups, within a ten year period starting in 2000 the number of servers worldwide has increased five-fold, while the amount of storage increased by a factor of 50. One way to curb this demand and save costs is virtualization. The software that controls the virtualization is referred to as a hypervisor or virtual machine manager. The hypervisor or virtual machine manager controls the physical machine’s processor, allocates resources to each virtual machine and makes sure the virtual machines do not disrupt each other’s operation. Virtual machines offer many benefits, but they present a new set of challenges to your IT staff. One challenge is that of backup and recovery. Most users, unaware of the differences, attempt to back up virtual machines the way they have backed up physical servers. This is typically by installing backup agents on each individual virtual machine. The installation of backup agents slows down the server and the applications running on the server. The preferred way is to employ a backup solution that runs at the hypervisor level and coordinates backup activities. This way nothing is slowed down and all the advantages of virtualization can be better realized. To learn more about keeping your data safe and backup and recovery on virtual machines, visit AppAssure and download a free trial version of Backup and Replication software.
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