Virtual Machine Backup and Recovery: Five Critical Decisions

Together with Symantec, Mahmoud Magdy (Microsoft MVP for Exchange Server) and Mikko Nykyri (VMware vExpert) we produced a whitepaper called “Virtual Machine Backup and Recovery: Five Critical Decisions”. This whitepaper covers an overview about virtualization and the challenges which come with the new workloads in terms of backup and recovery.

Because of the outstanding economy, flexibility, and service levels it offers, virtualization is  transforming data centers at breakneck speed: by 2016, an estimated 80 percent of the world’s x86 servers will be virtual machines (VMs).1 But the speed of this transformation, along with  the high resource utilization, ease of cloning,  moving workloads, and other ways virtualization  works its magic, raise challenges for “traditional” IT services and the teams that deliver them. Nowhere is the complexity that virtualization creates for traditional IT services more apparent than in backup and recovery, which participants in a recent Symantec survey ranked among their least-successful IT initiatives. This paper addresses five critical decisions organizations  must make when building a backup and recovery plan to:

• Maintain protection, visibility, and control of applications  and data.
• Maximize utilization of established infrastructure,  processes, staff, and budget.
• Use virtualization to improve backup and recovery processes.
• Create an efficient, scalable, future-prepared backup and recovery environment.

Each issue is presented first in general terms that apply across IT environments, and then add comments for specific platforms, applications, or industries based on our individual experience as VMware® vExperts and Microsoft® MVPs.

You can download the whitepaper here: Symantec Virtual Machine Backup and Recovery: Five Critical Decisions

Make also sure you checkout the Google Hangout event on Fri, May 10, 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM.

Join a panel of virtualization experts including Microsoft MVPs Mahmoud Magdy & Thomas Mauer and VMware vExpert Mikko Nykyri as they discuss the white paper they co-authored and offer their thoughts on the most important things to consider for a virtualized server environment.