Modern Middle Manager
Primarily my musings on the practical application of technology and management principles at a financial services company.
Server Consolidation II - Recovering from Server Failure

Monday, December 02, 2002  

One of the obvious consequences of server consolidation is that if a physical server dies, several virtual servers might be taken out as well. The simplified version of the solution we've implemented is to purchase a second physical server and place copies of the virtual machines on it. Because a virtual server consists of several files in a directory, migrating a virtual server from one physical piece of hardware to another is simple -- it's just a file copy. This reduces the proposed savings in my earlier post to only $8K, or 29% savings. Still substantial for most data centers.

Naturally a file-copy recovery strategy is only as good as the last virtual server backup. One improvement is to move rapidly-changing data off of the virtual server to some kind of centralized storage (in our case, a NetApp filer). Frequent backups of the virtual servers become unnecessary. Files that can't be migrated to a centralized storage device should be backed up on a regular schedule, preferably to a NAS or SAN -- again, for quick recovery.

posted by Henry Jenkins | 12/02/2002 08:05:00 PM

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