Disaster Recovery comes to virtualisation

About 7,000 attendees gathered at the VMworld conference in Los Angeles in November as vendors announced plans to help IT departments harness the potential of virtualisation.

At least two vendors took aim at providing business continuity for virtualised infrastructures. Symantec showed Veritas Cluster Server 5.0 for VMware ESX. The product automates failover in the event of outages and is due for commercial release early next year.

Double-Take Software showed its Double-Take for VMware Infrastructure that replicates environments to a secondary virtualisation infrastructure.

Zeus Technology showed off its Extensible Traffic Manager Virtual Appliance, a way to inspect and route network traffic to maintain optimal performance. The software runs on VMware’s ESX Server 3 platform.

InovaWave launched DXtreme, its software for “more than doubling” desktop and server virtualisation performance by creating dedicated channels for virtual disks.
The announcements came as UK systems integrator Morse said only a minority, 29 percent, of UK IT directors currently use virtualisation in live environments.

“Virtualisation has been pitched as the next big thing but it slots into that mould of lots of people talking about it and not many using it,” said Scott Reynolds, consultant at Morse.

One issue is management of virtualisation projects, Reynolds argued, as consolidation projects cut across departmental and managerial domains.

“You have to have correct management in place. Organisations are suffering from server sprawl and you have to make sure you don’t end up with virtualisation server sprawl.”