Disaster Recovery

In case of a disaster that destroys your servers, it is expedient to have a standby server that is a twin of the destroyed one. When the disaster hits, activate the twin server at VM Racks and begin to use it immediately.

The traditional method of replacing a destroyed server is time consuming and fraught with errors. Take a look at the traditional approach, which includes these steps:

1. Acquire a replacement server
2. Load the OS on the replacement server
3. Restore critical files from back up media
4. Debug problems resulting from discrepancies on the new server

In particular, step 4 can be a painful one that consumes much time because the newly rebuilt server doesn't have all the tweaks that were applied to the old server.

With VMware virtualization, your existing server or workstation is converted to a virtual machine using a P2V process (see below). Then, the newly created virtual machine is loaded on our VMware infrastructure read and available at a moment's notice.

Price

The price for the disaster recovery virtual machine is discounted by 30% off of the standard VM prices as long as your disaster recovery VM is powered on less than 72 hours per month. The idea is that you only need about 3 days a month to sync your production server with the disaster recovery server. The 72 hours can be split up in several ways. Possible schedules for the virtual machine being POWERED ON include:

• Any three days of the month (i.e., 1st, 15th, 30th)
• 8:00PM - 10:15PM  Daily
• Every other day for 4.8 hours

The disaster recovery virtual machine is powered on per the schedule you select in order to be available for synchronization with your production server; however, the majority of the time the disaster recovery virtual machine is dormant, waiting to be used in the event of a disaster.

Physical to Virtual Conversion (P2V)

In order to convert your physical server to a virtual server, a P2V process is available. Both Microsoft Windows and Linux servers alike can be converted to virtual machines using VMware's Converter product, which is available for free in the download section of www.wmware.com.

Converting a Windows machine, requires installing Converter on a machine running Microsoft Windows. A common storage area must exist between the Windows machine running Converter and the machine that is to be virtualized.

Depending on the amount of data, the conversion process will take several hours. Once the process is completed, the files can transferred to VM Racks via FTP.

VM Racks will then run an additional import step as needed and ensure the virtual machine is fully operational.

Detailed information is available, and VM Racks offers two free hours of consulting time should you need assistance in converting your production servers.