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The Essentials Series: Managing Your Virtualized Environment: Migration Tools, Backup and Disaster Recovery

by Dan Sullivan

SYNOPSIS

Many organizations implement virtualization to control costs and improve the flexibility and agility of their IT services. Virtualization has allowed organizations to realize significant hardware cost savings while improving agility -- but sometimes at a substantial cost for virtualization platforms. Fortunately, open source virtualization platforms can drive down IT operations costs while reducing the risk of vendor lock-in as well as maintaining needed levels of scalability and reliability. This Essentials Series outlines the business case for adopting open source virtualization, describes steps to migrating to an open source virtualization platform, and discusses how to leverage backup systems for improved operation and disaster recovery.


CHAPTER PREVIEWS

Article 1: The Business Case for Open Source Virtualization

Virtualization is a mature technology. Organizations are using virtualization to improve the efficiency of their IT operations and provide greater flexibility in how they deliver business services. They are also increasingly using multiple virtualization platforms. Doing so allows users to choose the best virtualization solution for their particular requirements without the risk of single vendor lock-in. Open source virtualization has demonstrated its cost advantages as well as its maturity and scalability without sacrificing integration with existing infrastructure.


Article 2: Migration to Open Source Virtualization

Open source virtualization will fit well in many organizations. One of the first considerations is how to migrate from currently deployed hypervisors to an open source platform. There are multiple ways to deploy virtualization and, in some cases, the best option is a combination of multiple hypervisors. In order to realize the greatest benefit of open source virtualization, you should keep in mind a number of factors. By weighing the relative importance of features against your requirements, you should be able to find a combination of virtualization platforms and migration procedures that fit your needs.


Article 3: Ongoing Operations: Backup, Disaster Recovery, and Data Protection

Maintaining your virtualized environment will require attention to backup, disaster recovery, and data protection. Although there are many similarities between these operations in non-virtualized and virtualized environments, there are significant differences as well. This concluding article on managing virtualized environments will examine the need for virtualization-aware backups, key features of backup solutions, disaster recovery and data protection considerations, and management concerns related to backup, disaster recovery, and data protection. The purpose of this article is to help you understand how to choose and deploy a backup solution that will meet your particular requirements.