How To Guy

How To Choose Virtualization Disaster Recovery Solutions

My list of features to help me narrow my buying decisions after the DR vendor has made its pitch.

• By David Davis
• 10/25/2011

Whenever I open my e-mail inbox or go to a conference, I seem to learn about a new backup/recovery and disaster recovery option for virtual infrastructures. The plethora of tools in these categories reminds me of the hundreds of options available for virtual infrastructure management. Being a former virtualization admin and IT infrastructure manager, I feel badly for those of you out there who are forced to select these tools and then continually re-evaluate whether you made the right choice. To try to help, I compiled two lists that I generally use to slot these various vendors (at least in my "mental file cabinet").

I generally put tools into the following categories:

• Legacy Backup/Recovery Tool that backs up physical and virtual
• Virtualization-only Backup/Recovery Tool
• Virtualization replication / DR tool
• OR, a combination of these (ie: virtualization tool that also does replication)

In general, the legacy tools do great at physical server backup and getting data off site (on tapes, for example) but aren't strong in features related to virtualization backup/recovery. On the other hand, the virtualization-only tools are strong when it comes to features related to virtualization backup/recovery but offer no way to backup physical servers or get data off site (other than, perhaps, replication).

What about features, you say? Here is my list of features that I ask about:

• Physical server backup
• Virtualization backup
• Strength of virtualization backup/recovery features
• Replication included
• Replication seeding
• VMware vSphere VADP support
• Virtual appliance install
• vSphere client integration
• Speed of backup
• Speed of recovery
• Mass recovery
• Virtual lab support
• Instant recovery
• Application awareness for recovery of data
• Deduplication & compression
• Multi-hypervisor support
• Licensing options and cost
• Quality of support
• Free trial--try out these solutions in your own virtualization lab environment to see what works best for you!

I'm sure that there are more questions that you could inquire about so why not ask them of the vendors, live! On Oct. 27, I'll be keynoting a webinar, "Protecting your Virtual Assets from Disaster." The webinar with two (or maybe more) vendors will include Veeam and Doyenz. You'll learn my take on virtualization disaster recovery as well as understand how these companies can help to make disaster recovery of your virtual infrastructure easy. Plus--and most importantly--you'll have the chance to get all your questions answered by me and our guest vendors in regard to the best way to protect your virtual infrastructure from disaster.

Here's all the info you need to know about the webinar (if you can't attend it live, don't worry--it will all be recorded for later playback). I hope that you'll join me. Register here!