The Fast Track to P2V

Regardless of the conversion tool used, moving an existing physical system to a virtual one requires taking an operating system and everything that resides on it—from applications to data, settings, and more—and abstracting it from the physical hardware. As a result, the operating environment changes from one that runs directly off physical hardware to one that runs on virtual hardware.

There are a variety of reasons for converting physical systems to virtual systems. Hardware can be used more efficiently by hosting multiple virtual server environments on one physical server. In the wake of a disaster, there may not be sufficient hardware to restore every system to its own device. And virtual systems can be used as a test bed for change management to make sure that changes do not negatively impact physical production systems.

Some virtualization software providers offer their own conversion tools for making this transition, helping their customers take advantage of this powerful technology that drives business value and meets operational efficiency objectives.

So do a growing number of system protection solutions. These solutions offer integrated virtual conversion tools that allow the conversion of a recovery point to one of today's popular virtual environments, typically VMware Virtual Disk (VMDK) or Microsoft Virtual Disk (VHD). Unlike other more traditional offerings, these solutions provide a wizard-driven interface to make conversion easy and intuitive.

For example, a typical conversion involves first capturing a system recovery point and then selecting the desired virtual disk format and a folder in which to place the virtual disk image. For VMDK conversions, the virtual disk file can be split into smaller files to enable the virtual disk to be copied to a FAT32 drive or to a DVD. These solutions also enable a seamless transfer of the VMDK files to VMware ESX servers, giving organizations greater flexibility in managing virtual conversions.

What's more, with these complete solutions, converting from a physical to a virtual environment is fast. In fact, some require only a fraction of the time of conventional virtualization software offerings. As a result, a conversion that might typically take two hours is reduced to 15 minutes.

The reason? The most advanced system protection solutions leverage powerful image capture technologies that are highly efficient with disk and resource I/O. By performing a linear copy of only the sectors on the system that contain data, these engines are very agile and quick.

There and Back Again

One of the most valuable capabilities of newer system protection solutions is that they also enable V2P conversion. This is critical for organizations whose conversion to a virtual environment is temporary and, when hardware is repaired or replaced, must return to a physical environment.

V2P is also essential when a virtual environment is used for preflight testing of patches, application installations, configuration changes, or driver updates before those changes are applied to production systems. V2P capabilities enable organizations to build a system and benchmark it offline in a virtual environment before bringing it online in a physical one.

The process of recovering a virtual environment to a physical one, V2P is also made possible with system protection solutions. A recovery point is created on the virtual system and loaded onto recovery media, and a recovery CD is booted on the new hardware. Storage devices are detected, networking services are automatically loaded, and the image is restored. Once the image is restored, the post-restore process automatically loads new critical drivers required for that virtual system to function on the physical system. With drivers in place, the system is ready to reboot, reconnect to the network, and be up and running.

Better yet, like P2V conversion using system protection solutions, V2P conversion is extremely fast, with some solutions providing 1–3 GB a minute conversion time.

Complementary Strategies

While more and more organizations consider adopting a virtualization strategy, disaster recovery has become nothing short of mandatory. After all, hardware failure is inevitable. Systems wear out and must be replaced. Accidents happen. So do power outages, natural disasters, and malicious threats. Yet, downtime is unacceptable.

Consequently, organizations must be able to recover from such occurrences in minutes rather than hours or days. However, even in rare situations in which duplicate hardware is in place, meeting such demanding recovery time objectives is problematic at best.

By leveraging hardware-independent system protection solutions that support a variety of virtual conversion options, organizations can complement their disaster recovery strategy with a robust virtualization strategy that safeguards business continuity and provides a more efficient IT infrastructure.

With these solutions, it makes no difference to which hardware a downed device is restored. By obviating the hardware incompatibility issues that continue to plague traditional layered restoration approaches, these solutions make quick work of recovering an entire site.

And, since they also enable the conversion from a physical environment to a virtual one and back again, today's more advanced system protection solutions represent a cost-effective approach to both disaster recovery and virtualization. They can even be used to convert from one vendor's virtualization platform to another or from a single vendor's more lightweight platform to its more robust one.

Ultimately, the greatest benefit of today's next-generation system protection solutions is that they offer organizations another choice for meeting their business objectives. By providing powerful recovery capabilities along with flexible restoration options and inclusive conversion capabilities, these solutions help deliver on the promises of a virtual world.