Virtualization Technology for SMB

• Author: Adriana Barnoschi
• Position: Associate Professor, Ph.D., Social and Administrative Sciences Faculty, “Nicolae Titulescu” University
• Pages: 476-483

Page 476

Introduction

The earthquakes, 9/11 event, summer storms and California fires have drawn attention to the importance of protecting data and applications. Most companies rely on computing system as their business infrastructure. So, companies need to backup their information in order to limit data loss and people started to think about disaster recovery. In other words, companies need to stay in business and people are ware of the value of lost data.

I achieved this conclusion by collecting data about natural and human inducted disasters correlated with business process, by studying different points of view of IT experts in storage network solutions for consolidation, by judging from the laws and standards addressed to BCP for improving an organization's information security, by analyzing disaster survival statistics, by making the choices for storage systems from SMB market.

The first question was: “Where shall I start from?” I found the answer: disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity plan (BCP). When I paid attention to the disaster planning, I attempt to find out what choices of storage system do I have (both conventional and new solutions) and if the researches are viable options for SMBs with limited resources and budgets.

I collected statistical data from analysts of IDC, of Forester Research Inc., of famous companies and I selected the ideas concerning the promised benefits of virtualization technology. I was thinking it’s important to know about their work and performances, not just because their word does matter, but their experience facilitates us at storage management into IT departments, it helps us to well-formulate the goals of our projects and business and it contribute to state the metrics of software quality.

The paper is organized as follows:

In sections 2 and 3, I give an overview of virtualization that contains a short history of this technology [1, 9], preferred definitions of concepts [2, 6] and one simple description of host/guest paradigm from the base of virtual machines [4, 5, 6].

Section 4 presents the goals of virtualization when it is used to put into practice a wide range of applications, a few suggestions for SMEs intended for successful virtualization implementations and the benefits of desktop virtualization for SMEs, since this technology has become so popular in storage management.

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Section 5 tells us what disaster continuity planning (DRP) is; why virtualization in a disaster recovery environment is very high on the managers’ list; what the gain of using virtualization in DR is? It is important to understand that business continuity planning (BCP) is a methodology and backup is a process. The logistical plan is called a Business Continuity Plan. DRP is a part of BCP. That’s why, when I design a disaster recovery plan I have to go through the methodology phases.

According with the chosen virtualization solution from section 5 and going from the idea that “everything starts with the business” [16], I proposed a disaster recovery plan that protects business data and applications of company. There are simple steps SMBs can take to prepare for the worst [15]. The business sets the IT budget and therefore the RTO and RPO metrics need to fit with the available budget.

The last section summarizes the contributions of this paper and discusses for future work.

Literature review of virtualization

Virtualization is almost as old as enterprise computing itself. First introduced in the 1960s to allow partitioning of mainframe hardware, it has been a foundation of high-end proprietary server environments ever since. Today, virtualization is once again a hot topic of conversation in the data center because emerging technologies have the potential to remedy issues relating to resource utilization, efficiency, scalability and manageability [1].

The idea of virtualization in computing systems is to add a layer of abstraction between two layers in that computer system. This layer allows reducing the management reliance on complicated elements, like building new servers or deploying new applications, while also enabling transiency of the underlying virtualized elements:

• By virtualizing a software application, we eliminate its direct hooks into its host operating system (OS) allowing to more easily install, remove and modify that software installation without affecting the host OS.

• By virtualizing an entire computer system, we encapsulate its configuration into a data structure that is more portable, easier to manage and has more capability for being backed up and restored [2].

Virtualization refers to the pooling of IT resources in a way that masks the physical nature and boundaries of those resources from resource users. In more concrete terms, virtualization is the decoupling of software from hardware. It is the abstracting of the software from the underlying implementation [1].

Server virtualization is the masking of server resources, including the number and identity of individual physical servers, processors, and operating systems, from server users. The server administrator uses a software application to divide one physical server into multiple isolated virtual environments. Server virtualization means the ability that allows multiple independent operating systems to run on the same hardware at the same time [3].

Virtualization software runs like an application on a computer, separate from the...