Virtualization Backup and Disaster Recovery Strategies

Virtualization backup and disaster recovery are two approaches to protect your virtual machines from external and internal threats. In the modern virtualization world, minimizing downtime can significantly benefit business continuity.

That is precisely why businesses are discovering the benefits of virtualization backup and DR (disaster recovery).

To understand the cost of downtimes, experts performed a study and found that companies suffered $300,000 in damages per downtime. Downtimes occur due to external and internal influences. For example, they could occur due to natural disasters, malicious actors, or a combination of both. So minimizing downtime becomes an essential practice for your virtual environment.

Experts also recommend two approaches. These are having a backup and recovery strategy and a disaster recovery plan. Both are entirely different approaches and should be treated as separate.

However, you can include both in your virtual machine security plan to ensure virtualization continuity. This guide will explain virtualization backup, and disaster recovery strategies businesses can use to secure their virtual environment.

With all that said, let’s start.

Explaining the Virtual Machine Backup Strategy

Virtual machine backup and recovery strategy refer to keeping backups of VM data and having access to recoveries for said backups. At the core of this strategy is using software that stores backups for access at a later time.

But first, you need to backup data from your virtual machines. One way to backup data is to transfer it back to the host operating systems. Although this is a common solution, it doesn’t solve all your problems.

Namely, businesses should avoid using local storage for backups. That’s precisely why a third-party backup solution offers off-site data storage for backups on a secure virtual server in their data centers. That way, businesses can easily go over the recovery process and use the backup software as the point of recovery.

All you would need to do is select the correct backup file during a disaster. But with so many third-party backup software out there, choosing the right backup software presents a big challenge.

Another backup strategy is to use snapshots. We should clarify that a virtual machine snapshot isn’t a backup and shouldn’t be treated as such. A snapshot is taken of the virtual machine at a point in time. It presents a copy of the VM at that specific time and includes all the files on the VM.

Snapshots also take the VMs state. If the VM is inoperable at the time of the snapshot, the snapshot is useless. Moreover, you can lose your snapshots if your host physical server suffers hardware failure.

Businesses can use these two backup strategies to protect their virtual environments. Now, let’s look at how a disaster recovery strategy helps protect your virtual environment.

Explaining the Virtualization Disaster Recovery Strategy

Both virtualization and backups are part of disaster recovery. But with so many ways to achieve the goal of protecting your virtual environments, they take a separate road and achieve the goal in drastically different ways.

Let’s remember that backups copy data from the VM and transfer it to a separate file that can be used for recovery. Virtualization is a disaster recovery plan in itself, in a way that virtualization was used to run virtual servers instead of physical servers. The benefit of having virtual over physical server environments is that it gives you flexibility over your disaster recovery planning.

In a virtual environment, VMs are used as containers for the server. They’re independent of the physical hardware and can be placed off-site. This eliminates natural disaster risks as the servers are either off-site or on the cloud. The latter’s benefit is that you can access the VMs from anywhere. Suppose some form of natural disaster strikes your organization. In that case, there is a high chance physical servers become inoperable or damaged in the process.

But when the server is on the cloud, the disaster recovery process is seamless. So, what’s the best way to use virtualization as a disaster recovery plan?

Building a disaster recovery plan involves virtual infrastructure planning and designing the entire virtual environment. Going over these disaster recovery tasks gives you more ways to mitigate disasters and recover virtual machines.

These disaster recovery tasks help you achieve business continuity in more than one way. Let’s explain how.

• Virtualization allows organizations to power up new VMs instantaneously. The new VMs can be exact replicas of existing or previous VMs with exact configurations. That’s precisely why VM templates are so popular in modern virtualization disaster recovery.
• Virtualization allows organizations to use a designated disaster recovery site to replicate workloads solely.
• The use of virtual servers allows recovery flexibility during disasters. A designated virtual data recovery server grants organizations the flexibility to enter into disaster recovery mode through the use of virtualization technologies.

Conclusion

Virtual machine backups and disaster recovery share many similarities. Backups are essential to your virtual disaster recovery strategy. Still, the importance of backups puts these strategies into a separate bracket.

Virtual disaster recovery is an evolution of traditional, physical disaster recovery. With virtual DR, organizations have more ways to mitigate downtime and failover by accessing essential VM data.

Regardless, virtualization backup and disaster recovery strategies are essential for organizations relying on virtual machines for business continuity.