Jul 9, 2008

Introduction
Virtual machines are fast becoming a critical part of many data centers, and in the recent past, organizations across the globe have begun some form of a virtualization solution in an effort to consolidate their IT Departments with the goal of increasing utilization and reducing management and infrastructure costs. According to Avamar, more than 20,000 customers of all sizes are going through server consolidation. There are no two opinions on the fact that virtual infrastructures are a superior solution to the challenges of distributed server architecture and a sure shot way of reducing the TCO.

However, a virtualization solution has its down side. There is a disproportionate ratio of data to physical bandwidth, which is created by consolidating physical servers to a single virtual server. Many customers who have deployed a virtualization solution in their existing IT department have experienced an increase in storage requirements. One of the main reasons for this increase is the challenge of backups that can lead to inefficient backup solutions. The argument that virtualization eliminates the need for traditional backup and restore has already been proven wrong.

As more and more production applications are being run in virtualized environments, the need to shield the virtual machines running the production applications against data loss has become urgent. It is imperative for an IT manager to know how long it will take to rebuild servers after a disaster because with virtualization, an equivalent event is more likely to happen. If you can’t or don’t have backups that can be restored to bare metal, then you have a challenge.

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