I ran across a blog post by Scott Lowe "Cool storage tricks: VMware Site Recovery Manager" on TechRepublic. The post referenced a new offering from VMware called Site Recovery Manager and it sounds as if it's designed to automate recovery at a hot site.
The product should help an organization meet their recovery objectives much quicker than traditional methods that use bare metal restore or OS installation and restore from tape. This product most likely relies heavily on VMware's Virtual Infrastructure 3 solution and the ability to use the High Availability and VMotion components to perform a live migration of virtual machines without service interruption.
Another aspect will be the ability to create virtual machine clones of those physical servers running in the datacenter and bringing those virtual machines online at the hot site when necessary. This Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) conversion has matured and can be performed using a number of products, but VMware Converter is available at no cost for customers who already own VirtualCenter Management Server.
PlateSpin has been touting the use of their P2V product, PowerConvert, as a DR solution, not just for consolidating physical servers by converting them to virtual machines. Have you considered using a similar P2V approach to DR?
Comment Preview