Five things virtualization has changed in your dr plan

Five Things Virtualization Has Changed
In Your Disaster Recovery Plan
Josh Mazgelis – Senior Product Marketing Manager
Friday, December 06, 2013

Quick Introductions
About Neverfail

About Josh Mazgelis

 Business Continuity Lifecycle
Management (BCLM)
 Disaster recovery software

 Product Marketing Manager
• (The guy who knows technology)

 18+ years in the tech industry

• Application high availability
• 12+ years in the market

• TS, SA, PM, SE, PMK…
• 8 years in disaster recovery

 VMware & Microsoft partner

 Experience working customers

• Significant investments

 Strategic OEM relationships
• VMware vCenter Heartbeat
• SolarWinds Orion Failover Engine
• Cisco, Honeywell, others…

• IT disaster recovery
• Personal experience in
recovering from failures

 Online in many places
• Twitter, LinkedIn, Spiceworks…

Today’s Agenda
 Improvements in backup processes
 Improvements in server recovery

 Increased simplicity in disaster recovery deployment
 Improvements in complete site recovery options
 Increased complexity in SLA management

Recovery Definitions
Recovery Point Objective (RPO):
 The maximum desired time period prior to a failure or
disaster during which changes to data may be lost as a
consequence of recovery.
Recovery time objective (RTO)
 The recovery time objective (RTO) is the maximum tolerable
length of time that a computer, system, network, or
application can be down after a failure or disaster occurs.

Improvements in
Backup Processes

How is Backup Better with Virtualization
 Traditional computers become VM containers
• Just files on a disk, not complete disk volumes
• Fully abstracted from the physical hardware layer

 Basic protection is easier obtain
• Many vendors provide methods of moving protecting VM’s
• Replication and deduplication are commonplace
• Block-level backup & restore speed processes

Traditional Server Backup
 Treat each machine like a physical server
 Backup agent in each machine
• Supports physical and virtual machines
• Enables granularity in the backup objects
• Inefficient and “expensive” with resources

Modern Virtual Server Backup
 Treat VM’s as containers on disk
• VMware Consolidated Backup as an example

 Quick and simple copies of all virtual machines
• Limited granularity in backup & recovery
• Does not address physical servers

Improvements in
Recovery from Failures

How is Recovery Better with Virtualization?
 Hypervisor clusters improve hardware availability
 Bare-metal recovery presents fewer challenges

 Increasing abstraction of resources
 Resiliency in virtual hardware

How We Used To Do Application Recovery
 Application data backed up to tape library daily
• Tapes trucked to and from off-site storage daily

 Supporting OS & application installed on “spare”
(i.e. “previously replaced”) hardware
 Application data restored (hopefully) to DR server
• RTO measured in hours to days!

How We Recover with Virtualization
 Backup a VM image to some disk storage
 Restore that image to a previous version
-or-

 Restore that image to another hypervisor

One Pitfall of Virtual Recovery
 A copy of a sick VM is still a sick VM
 Restore that image to a previous version (hit on RPO)
-or-

 Repair that image and accept downtime (hit on RTO)

Increased Simplicity in
Disaster Recovery Deployment

How are DR Deployments
Better with Virtualization?

How are DR Deployments
Better with Virtualization?
 Redundant compute power is more affordable
• Virtual datacenters being defined in software
• Private cloud & public cloud deployments

 Retired hardware supports
similar hypervisors
• Old physical servers can
be reused more easily
• VM images restart on any
hardware with no changes

Traditional DR Site Complexity
 Only large corporations could afford a second datacenter
• Even then secondary hardware was hard to acquire
• Moving data between sites remained a challenge

Recovery as a Service (RaaS) for Everyone
 RaaS enables DR “sites” for most SMB’s
• Pay-as-you-go pricing models
• Operating expense vs. capital expenses

Improvements in
Complete Site Recovery

How is Full Site Recovery
is Better with Virtualization
 Restoring backups to a new location is more simple
• Dissimilar hardware is no longer a hurdle
• “Recovering” from site failures is more of “restarting”

 Replication of VM images between sites
• Storage hardware or hypervisor level replication
• Many built-in and add-on replication options

 These are the site recovery “enablers”
• Better backup & restore over wide-area networks
• Stand-by capacity to bring required machines online

How is Full Site Recovery
is Better with Virtualization
 Automation of site recovery process
• Recovery could be done by hand, but would take many hours
• Automation simplifies the task to “one button” to push
• Most critical machines can be prioritized in recovery plans

 Many plans can be customized
to meet specific needs
• Incorporation of 3rd-party
tools in recovery plans
• Neverfail’s Heartbeat Failover Engine is one example
• Increased RPO/RTO for physical & virtual machines

Site Recovery with VMware SRM

 Does periodic replication meet RPO requirements?
 What about physical servers?

Expanding New Models
with Traditional Methods
 Incorporate physical servers with 3rd-party options
• Neverfail extends VMware SRM to include physical servers

Increased Complexity in
SLA Management

How are SLA’s More Complex
with Virtualization?
 Dynamic virtual environments change quickly
•
•
•
•

New machines quickly deployed into environment
New applications may quickly become “critical”
VM’s move easily to different hosts & disks
Does DR planning keep up with changes?

 Better protection is costs more resources
• Compute power for stand-by servers
• Bandwidth for data/server replication
• Storage for VM copies & versioning

 Hardware availability creates false sense of security
• Hardware problems are small impact to application availability
• A copy of a sick VM is still sick no matter where it is started
• An older version of a VM is an older copy of data

 Growing rift between physical and virtual machines
• New “backup 2.0” solutions getting attention
• Physical servers getting “backup 1.0” protection
• Critical servers may not have adequate visibility & protection

 Increased SLA expectations
• Business is relying on IT
more than ever
• Perception of recovery
capabilities becoming faster
• Hardware & environmental issues are in fact reduced
• Application downtime still a persistent problem

How Do We Manage the Complexities of
Disaster Recovery in a Virtual World?
 Business continuity lifecycle management
• BC/DR needs to be a continual process, not a one-time project
• Recovery plans need to evolve with the environment
• Continual monitoring and updating of DR plans

You’ve Heard Enough
From Me Today…
…are your questions ready to be answered?

Questions and Answers
 Please use the GoToWebinar console
to submit your questions for us
 We will answer as many questions we can,
and follow up on those that we can’t!
 Visit us at www.neverfailgroup.com to learn more
• Also find us online at:
• Spiceworks, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+

• Or call us direct:
• (512) 327-5777
• (0) 870 777-1500

Thank You & Closing Statements
 Thank you from me & from Neverfail for your time today
 Thank you from your company for being on top of BCLM

 Thank you from Spiceworks on your community involvement
 Last minutes announcements from Abby @ Spiceworks…

Thank you for your time
We look forward to helping you with BCLM

Session Abstract
5 things virtualization has changed in your BC plan
Are you still rolling with the changes? Virtualization has made a
huge impact on the way we deploy our computer workloads, and
with that it has also changed the ways in which we protect
them. The business continuity plans in place for IT even just five
years ago look very different than what many companies have in
place today. Keeping on top of these changes will help you
understand your recovery capabilities, and your limitations as
well. Join us with our friends at Neverfail and make sure you're
keeping your IT business continuity plans spicy and fresh!

Five things virtualization has changed in your dr plan

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Editor's Notes