Ensuring Business Continuity for Virtualization

Ensuring Business Continuity for VirtualizationVirtualization is a growing trend in the IT industry. Organizations are leveraging virtualization in distributed environments to reduce their overall physical server footprint and maximize the utilization of each physical server. Reducing the number of physical servers decreases the carbon emissions and power consumption by the organization. This is the right thing to do for the environment and can reduce the organization’s power and support costs.

However, introducing virtualization increases the complexity of ensuring critical applications, such as company email or front-end applications are always available. Having data recoverability with robust and proven solutions is also essential to all virtual solutions.

CA, Inc. (CA) provides software to address business continuity for virtualization. The following sections identify two CA software products that address high availability and disaster recovery for distributed virtual environments.

www.dataprofilers.com - 1 – © 2008 1-888-GET-ER1S

High AvailabilityOne of the most important factors for putting critical applications in virtual environments is ensuring high availability. It is important to understand that the virtual environment provides high availability at a physical server level. CA’s VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) addresses global scheduling by creating dynamic resource pools of physical machines. DRS can then dynamically move entire virtual machines across the pool without having to restart the virtual machines themselves. When a physical machine runs out of resources or becomes unavailable the DRS will automatically move the virtual machines to another available physical server. This ensures high availability at a system level, but not at an application level.

In order to truly ensure high availability for applications in virtual environments, CA XOsoft™ High Availability (HA) is needed. This software provides high availability at the application level. Combining this CA software with VMware HA provides a complete high availability solution for your virtual environments. This industry leading software provides data replication, automated push-button or fully automated failover and fail-back of the application server over a LAN or WAN, application aware status monitoring, integrated TRUE Continuous Data Protection as a guard against data corruption, and completely non-disruptive automatic testing of your disaster recovery system. CA’s software sets the industry standard for ease of configuration and management.

If you implement both CA and VMware high availability solutions both the master and replica virtual machines are safely implemented on the same physical servers as identified in the following diagram. Through virtualization the overall cost of high availability is reduced because you no longer need to acquire additional hardware to implement the solution. This increases the viability of the solution for all applications.


Software Highlights Failover functions as expected but once the primary system is back up, the two

systems can be resynchronized by restarting the High Availability scenario. The application can then fail-back with a push of a button. This eliminates the need for time consuming and complex reconfiguration to prepare for the fail-back.

TRUE Continuous Data Protection (CDP) is supported to recover the data back to any point in time. This allows rewind capability to before the interruption due to data corruption (if this is the cause of disruption). This reduces downtime and data loss.

Automated testing with Assured Recovery. Regular or scheduled testing of the solution can be performed using Assured Recovery.. Manual testing is also supported.

CA XOsoft™ High Availability provides coverage for the following applications:

Microsoft Exchange Microsoft SQL Server Oracle Microsoft IIS Web Servers Blackberry Server File Servers Other applications on both 32-bit

and 64-bit Windows Servers


Backup and RecoveryAll server environments need some level of backups done. Virtual servers require integrated backup solutions in order to restore data to a specific application on a virtual machine. CA ARCserve® Backup (ARCserve) provides an integrated backup solution for VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) support. This integration allows ARCserve to backup your virtual environments, as well as your physical servers.

The ARCserve integration with VMware provides a special agent for virtualization. This agent supports the physical to virtual bare metal restore, as well as file level restores to support disaster recovery for your virtual environments. File level restores to the original virtual machine location is also supported for virtual environments.

ARCserve provides the following agents in addition to the VMware Agent: Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft Exchange Server Microsoft SharePoint Oracle Lotus Domino SAP R/3 Sybase Many others

These ARCserve agents ensure data integrity by protecting the transaction log, archive log, journal files, and the data itself. The agents provide high-performance, non-disruptive backup and restore operations.

Finally, ARCserve is integrated with the CA XOsoft™ High Availability. This integration allows the user to browse and backup replicated data, restore data to the master or replica server, create synthetic full backups, view CA XOsoft Replication Reports, and launch the CA XOsoft Replication interface. This integration provides a


complete high availability and disaster recovery plan for your applications in virtualized environments.

VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) integration

High speed backup solution with encryption and anti-virus built into the product

Integration with CA XOsoft™ High Availability and CA XOsoft Replication

Going Green with CA and Data InnovationsVirtualization can reduce your physical server footprint and therefore reduce power and hardware costs. However, virtualization introduces complexities that need to be addressed. Utilizing CA products together provides a powerful solution for high availability and disaster recovery for your virtual applications. The diagram below demonstrates how organizations can leverage virtualization with mission critical applications, such as a corporate email system.

There is no doubt that every organization can benefit from virtualization. However, there are a lot of questions that need to be answered before going green. What environments


are appropriate for virtualization? Which applications and servers should be virtualized? What software is required to support the virtualized applications and environments? How will disaster recovery be addressed? How can business continuity be ensured for mission critical applications?

“Going Green” Jump-Start PackageThis jump-start package includes a combination of software and professional services to ensure that your virtualization projects are successful. Our experts will assist with the installation and deployment of CA’s high availability and backup software to protect and manage your distributed virtual environments. The virtual jump-start package is tailored to the needs of your virtual implementation.

Data Innovations, Inc.The intention of offering the jump-start package is to help clients establish enterprise level virtual environments by utilizing CA software products. As an official CA commercial reseller, Data Innovations (www.dataprofilers.com) incorporates the cost of the CA software into the jump-start package. Data Innovations is also an official CA service provider and has successfully delivered services to clients in this capacity. Client references are available upon request.

Contact UsData Innovations, Inc.Phone: 1-888-GET-ER1S (438-3717)Email: [email protected]
