Planning for Disaster Recovery Using Virtualization

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A catastrophic failure of a main datacenter or the simple loss of the servers in remote site is an IT Departments nightmare scenario. Planning how to restore services as quickly as possible with the minimal data loss is a key IT task. Virtualization technologies offer the ability to simplify some of that planning. Being able to take a copy of a virtual image and redeploy it on another server drastically reduces the downtime and potential data loss.

Taking a copy of an existing virtual image and deploying it on another server as a backup drastically reduces the downtime and potential data loss.

The resources on this page are designed to help you plan and use these protections systems to create a disaster recovery scenario for your organization.

Getting IT services back up and running after a disaster is often determined by how fast new hardware can be sourced and then how fast the backup processes work. When individual servers are involved this can be a complex process. Creating virtual images as a disaster recovery policy, either from physcial machines or from existing virtual hosts, can speed up the restore process.

The scenario described on this page is designed to provide a template for your disaster recovery plan. It may not match your needs exactly, but it should get you to right resources to make the best decision for your organization.

Planning for System Center Data Protection Manager Deployment
Lay out your protection group plans in advance to ensure reliable backup and data restoration.

Data Protection Manager 2010 Planning and Deployment Checklist
TechNet Library provides an end-to-end guide for new deployments and upgrades.

Selecting the Right Virtualization Technology
A guide to making smart virtualization technology decisions.

Data Protection Manager 2010 Storage Calculator (Excel)
A spreadsheet for determining how any servers, volumes and virtual machines you will need for your project.