Virtualisation continues to grow in popularity with real implications when it comes to backup and disaster recovery
Since its first appearance on industry-standard servers in 2001, virtualisation has taken the market by storm, becoming the accepted norm in datacentres right across the globe. Whether it’s vSphere from VMware®, Microsoft®’s Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer or whatever, the majority of companies now install a hypervisor on their servers as a matter of course, enabling them to maximise use of costly datacentre hardware while, at the same time, delivering increased levels of flexibility and availability through virtual machine deployment.
Along with such benefits, however, come additional responsibilities when it comes to backup and recovery of virtual environments and the data associated with them. Taking backups of physical host servers simply isn’t good enough anymore. Companies need tools that are “virtualisation-aware” and thus able to protect and recover individual VMs without affecting others on the same host.
Whether this kind of backup and recovery protection is implemented using tools designed solely for a particular virtualisation platform or as part of a wider solution able to protect physical and virtual machines is open to debate. Either way, it’s a pressing need given the ever growing enthusiasm for virtualisation in the datacentre and one which backup specialist Acronis is committed to helping customers meet.
