Книга: Mastering VMware® Infrastructure3

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Best Practices

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Best Practices

The configuration details regarding the virtual networking best practices shown here can be found in Chapter 10.

? Implement Microsoft Clustering Services to achieve high availability of individual virtual machines. Note that versions of ESX Server prior to 3.5 were certified for support of Microsoft server clusters in virtual machines. As of this writing, the recertification process for clustering in a virtual machine was not complete. Please refer to the VMware website for updated information about supported technologies.

? Implement VMware High Availability (HA) to provide automatic restart of virtual machines residing on an ESX Server that fails.

? Use strict admission control for HA clusters unless virtual machine performance is not as important as simply having the virtual machine powered on.

? Prioritize virtual machines for startup after server failure. Prepare a contingency plan for powering off unnecessary virtual machines in the event of server failure, resulting in reduced computing power.

? Implement a backup strategy that involves a blend of full virtual machine backups with file level backups.

? Purchase enough backup agents to ensure minimal recovery times for servers with critical production data. Schedule the backups to ensure that recovery times are appropriate for the data type. For example, for data with greater value and a requirement for quicker restore, backups should be scheduled more often than usual.

? Do not use virtual machine snapshots as long-term solutions to disaster recovery or business continuity. Snapshots are meant as a temporary means of providing an easy rollback feature and are used primarily for short term recovery purposes.

? Back up data as often as needed as determined by a written business continuity/disaster recovery plan. More critical data should be backed up more often to prevent less data loss in the event of disaster.

? Test the full and virtual machine backups regularly by restoring to a test or development network.

? Store a copy of virtual machine backups in an off-site location. Otherwise, use tools to perform virtual machine replication to distant datacenters. Virtualization offers significant advantages in the realm of disaster recovery because virtual machines are encapsulated into a discrete set of files.

? Purchase licenses for Windows Server 2003 Datacenter to achieve a greater return on investment and achieve less stringent VMotion restrictions. Datacenter licenses allow for the installation of an unlimited number of virtual machines per ESX Server host.

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