Disaster Recovery and Replication provided by VMware for Social Services

An 80+ user social services provider, had an interest in the consolidation and High Availability that originally sparked their interest in virtualization with VMware. After some conversation it became apparent that a Disaster Recovery (DR) site would be of value to the client and more easily implemented with virtualization.

VMware vSphere 4.0 was deployed at the client as the virtualization platform and High Availability was configured and an HP LeftHand storage solution was chosen as the storage platform for the infrastructure. A remote office was chosen as the DR replication site. Deployed at the DR site on a storage server running VMware ESXi 4.0 and the HP LeftHand Virtual SAN Appliance, which allows the use of storage internal to a VMware Host to be used in an HP LeftHand storage infrastructure.

Now employing features of both VMware virtualization and the HP LeftHand storage solution this organization is able to replicate their virtual servers, in their entirety to the remote DR site. In doing so their timeframe to recover from one or many server failures has dropped from days to hours.

Not only is this client experiencing the benefits and peace of mind of a DR site, they are also realizing the reduction of physical servers, the reduction in space, cooling, electricity costs, and centralized server management and monitoring that VMware provides. This social services provider is currently migrating servers and should be fully virtualized, with no physical windows servers, within 6 months of their VMware implementation completion.