Virtual Machine Failovers have definitive advantages towards business continuity. Virtualization, or the abstraction of computer resources, is the latest and perhaps the fastest accepted trend in the industry. A virtual machine was originally defined by Popek and Goldberg as “an efficient, isolated duplicate of a real machine”. Basically a Virtual Machine, or VM, is nothing but a software implementation of a computer system that is capable of program execution in the same way as a physical machine.
A Virtual Server, on the other hand, typically is a server at a remote location, and is shared by more than one web site owners and each of them is given a feeling as if they were working on their own private server and have complete control over it. Amongst the numerous advantages offered by virtual servers is the flexibility they endow organizations with by giving them the ability to do more with less as they allow the consolidation of data and applications onto a single server. This results in lowered costs, simplified IT management, and reduction in space requirements. The need to protect these virtualised systems is imperative and in situations where companies are looking to reduce the costs associated with disaster recovery planning, virtualisation can facilitate easier recovery without the big chunk of additional cost.
One of the greatest advantages offered by virtualization is Virtual Machines Failover. It means that the virtual machines have the ability to fail over virtual workloads from one host to another. Any and every virtual platform, which exists in the market today, offers some mechanism for relocating a running or a recently failed virtual machine to another host. Most organisations, when defining their environments, concentrate on rapid data growth, complexity, stringent business requirements and the increasing government regulations. This makes it difficult for them to keep a check on their data protection strategies. The area of focus is either on just protecting data – not necessarily on recovering it, or on recovery, which usually involves just making data available to an application. Virtual machine failovers are not only an added advantage to business continuity but are crucial for it because it can be an actual matter of success or failure if data and applications on a production server are lost.
A proper planning and management ensures that businesses can maintain their continuity in carrying out all essential tasks even when any kind of disruption occurs. A problem that is generally faced while implementing the concept of virtual machine failovers is that sometimes certain business regulations, which haven’t been modified with changing times, state that “a server should provide only one function”. This can be interpreted as it is necessary that the servers cannot be distributed over a virtual platform. However, there can be ways and means to handle such regulatory measures even while ensuring maximum security and efficient usage while implementing advancing technologies. The first approach preaches logical separation of sensitive data from the rest of the network. By separating sensitive data into its own environment, solution providers need only apply such stringent business regulations to that area, rather than to the customer’s full environment. Although the solution is an effective one, it has one major drawback. The associated expense to this solution is high, hence limiting acceptance of the solution.
Another effective solution to the problem of segregation is consolidation of sensitive workloads with out-of-scope workloads into the same cluster. The latest virtual clustering technologies include built-in mechanisms for logically separating virtual machines onto specific hosts. Although there are risks associated with hybridising the security zones, the business regulation guidelines allow for documented processes to assure configurations remain correct. Hybridising security zones even allow for larger cluster sizes, which in turn results in better reassignment to resources when any kind of failure occurs. In all, a perfect balancing between adhering to business regulations and use of virtual machine failovers has to be made, keeping in mind the cost effectiveness of the solution used as per requirement of the organisation.
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