Virtualization and disaster recovery are essential components of modern data center operations. Virtualization allows data centers to abstract compute, storage, and networking resources into software-defined layers. This provides flexibility, efficiency, and resiliency. Meanwhile, disaster recovery protects against outages and data loss through solutions like backups, replication, and redundant infrastructure.
Together, virtualization and disaster recovery provide powerful capabilities for ensuring business continuity and rapid recovery after disruptions. For data centers using Cisco UCS infrastructure, virtualization unlocks key features for enhancing disaster recovery. This includes live migration of virtual machines, simplified management at scale, and integration with leading business continuity solutions.
This article will provide an overview of how virtualization specifically helps improve disaster recovery within data centers using Cisco UCS platforms. It will cover the leading capabilities and integrations that allow enterprises to reduce recovery time objectives and minimize disruption after outages or disasters.
Benefits of Virtualization for Disaster Recovery
Virtualization provides significant benefits for disaster recovery within a data center by enabling hardware independence for virtual machines (VMs). Since VMs are abstracted from the underlying physical hardware, they can be easily migrated to different hosts without compatibility issues. As noted in the whitepaper from NetApp, “One of the main benefits of virtualization for disaster recovery is independence of the recovery process from the recovery hardware. Because virtual machines are hardware agnostic, spare capacity for disaster recovery can be created on dissimilar, heterogeneous hardware” (source).
The portability of VMs facilitates faster and more automated disaster recovery. In the event of a host failure or data center outage, VMs can quickly be moved or replicated to standby hosts or a secondary site with minimal downtime. This greatly reduces recovery time objectives (RTOs) compared to physical systems. According to the NetApp whitepaper, virtualization “simplifies DR testing and reduces RTO” (source).
In addition, virtualization improves redundancy and resiliency. Rather than relying on a single physical server, VMs can be distributed across hosts and clustered using technologies like VMware vSphere. This provides built-in failover capabilities in case a host goes down. The ability to run multiple VMs per host also maximizes compute resources for enhanced efficiency.
Cisco UCS Platform
The Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) provides a unified architecture for computing, networking, storage access, virtualization, and management in data centers. The core components of the Cisco UCS architecture include:
Fabric Interconnects: These are the “brains” of the UCS system, providing a single point of connectivity and management for the entire UCS system. The fabric interconnects connect all other components like blade servers, chassis, fabric extenders. There are typically two fabric interconnects deployed in an active-active configuration for redundancy (https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-6300-series-fabric-interconnects/solution-overview-c22-744679.html).
UCS Manager: This is the centralized management interface for all software and hardware components of the UCS system. It is embedded on the fabric interconnects.
UCS Chassis: These house the blade servers, I/O modules, and fabric extenders. The chassis connects to the fabric interconnects.
UCS Blade Servers: These are the x86 compute nodes housed in the chassis. Multiple blade servers can be provisioned as needed.
By integrating all these components together with unified management, Cisco UCS provides simplified scalability, reduced cabling, and automated provisioning for data centers.
Virtual Machine Mobility
One key capability that virtualization provides for disaster recovery is live migration of virtual machines between hosts. This allows VMs to be moved from one physical server to another with minimal downtime (see: VMware).
Live migration greatly reduces disruption when failing over VMs to a secondary site. Rather than having to shut down VMs and restart them on the recovery site, live migration only briefly pauses the VM to transfer its memory state before resuming execution on the new host (see: TechTarget). This minimizes downtime during outages and allows for smoother disaster recovery.
Overall, live VM mobility is a critical capability enabled by virtualization that improves disaster recovery plans. By avoiding lengthy shutdowns and restarts, organizations can failover VMs with minimal disruption to operations.
Storage Virtualization
Storage virtualization is a key capability for disaster recovery in a virtualized data center. By creating pooled storage, storage virtualization improves redundancy and availability. The Cisco UCS platform leverages capabilities like SAN storage pooling to provide resilient shared storage that can be accessed by virtual machines (VMs) across multiple hosts.
Some key benefits of storage virtualization for disaster recovery include:
- Centralized storage pools consisting of physical storage from multiple devices. This provides redundancy if one storage device fails.
- Storage can be allocated flexibly across the pool to VMs as needed, allowing dynamic scaling.
- Simplified storage provisioning and management since the physical storage is abstracted.
- Non-disruptive migration of virtual machine disks across storage devices since the virtual disks are independent of the underlying physical storage.
Overall, storage virtualization improves availability and resiliency, which is critical for disaster recovery scenarios. The centralized storage pools provide redundancy while the abstraction from the physical storage enhances VM mobility and dynamic resource allocation. Cisco UCS takes advantage of these capabilities natively to facilitate disaster recovery.
Network Virtualization
Network virtualization is a key component of disaster recovery in a data center because it provides path isolation and redundancy between virtual machines. With network virtualization, virtual LANs (VLANs) can be created to separate traffic between different virtual machines even if they are sharing the same physical network. This allows for virtual machine mobility without disruption if a physical server goes down during a disaster.
In a Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) environment, VLANs can span across multiple physical switches using virtual port channels (vPCs), providing redundancy at the network level. If a switch fails, traffic can continue flowing on the remaining switches. Additionally, features like Cisco’s FabricPath allow for multi-pathing on L2 networks, adding resiliency through redundancy. Overall, network virtualization builds in the fault tolerance needed for strong disaster recovery.
Sources:
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/6664/
https://www.chegg.com/homework-help/questions-and-answers/combines-physical-resources-servers-processors-operating-systems-applications-server-virtu-q127797488
Backup and Replication
Virtualization enables efficient backup and replication strategies for disaster recovery. With virtual machines (VMs), backups can be taken at the VM level rather than the physical server level. This allows incremental backups to be taken of VM disk files rather than full backups of entire physical servers. Popular solutions like Veeam Backup & Replication provide image-based VM backup as well as replication of VMs for disaster recovery.
Common VM backup types include:
- Full backups – complete backup of the VM
- Incremental backups – backup of blocks changed since last full or incremental backup
- Reverse incremental backups – backup of blocks changed since last full backup
VM replication is critical for disaster recovery sites. Solutions like Veeam allow VMs to be replicated to a secondary site in near real-time. If the primary site fails, the replicated VMs can be brought online rapidly at the disaster recovery site.
Orchestration and Automation
Virtualization enables organizations to automate disaster recovery workflows and processes through orchestration platforms like VMware vRealize Orchestrator or Cisco Process Orchestrator. These platforms can automate tasks like failover testing, disaster recovery plan execution, and workload migration in the event of an outage or disaster scenario.
Orchestration platforms integrate with virtualization management tools to provide coordinated automation across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. They can execute pre-defined runbooks to automatically restore virtual machines and workloads to a secondary disaster recovery site in the correct order based on application tiers and dependencies. This helps minimize downtime and ensures consistent, repeatable recovery processes.
Automating recovery plan testing is another key benefit. Orchestration platforms can regularly test failover of virtualized workloads to validate that application data and configurations are properly replicated. This helps identify any gaps that need to be addressed before an actual disaster scenario.
Overall, orchestration and automation enables organizations to validate their disaster recovery capabilities on an ongoing basis and gain confidence that virtualized workloads can be rapidly restored in the event of a disruption. This reduces the complexity and human effort required for disaster recovery processes using virtualization.
Disaster Recovery Sites
A key component of any disaster recovery plan is having one or more disaster recovery sites to fail over to in case the primary data center experiences an outage. Virtualization enables greater flexibility in setting up and managing disaster recovery sites.
With private or public cloud disaster recovery, virtual machines can be easily replicated or failed over to cloud infrastructure. Cisco offers disaster recovery solutions leveraging Microsoft Azure called Cisco CloudCenter for Business Continuity. This allows seamless failover of UCS virtual machines to Azure without complex networking changes.
Cisco also offers physical disaster recovery sites called Cisco Recovery Point Infrastructure Services. These sites have UCS infrastructure ready to take over virtual machine workloads if needed. Network connectivity is established between the primary and recovery sites.
Overall, virtualization provides agility in setting up and managing disaster recovery infrastructure. Whether using private clouds, public clouds, or dedicated recovery sites, virtual machines can quickly move to alternate sites in a disaster scenario.
Conclusion
Virtualization provides critical benefits for enabling robust disaster recovery within a data center. By abstracting compute, storage, and network resources into software-defined formats, virtualization enables greater flexibility, mobility, and continuity of operations.
Key benefits covered in this article include:
- Enabling automated failover of virtual machines to alternate sites during a disruption
- Allowing storage replication and backup across sites
- Facilitating policy-based orchestration of disaster recovery workflows
- Supporting flexible network configurations across sites
- Reducing hardware dependency for disaster recovery capabilities
Looking ahead, as virtualization and hyperconverged infrastructure continue evolving, disaster recovery will become even more seamless. Hybrid cloud disaster recovery leveraging public cloud as a DR site shows promise for greater flexibility. And containerization may allow disaster recovery at even more granular application levels.
With careful virtualization planning and implementation, organizations can gain significant resiliency and continuity benefits for their mission-critical operations.