Roughly 60% of enterprises have implemented a disaster recovery plan (DRP) or are in the process of doing so. However, there is still a distinct lack of awareness of DRP benefits, or a lack of buy-in from executive management unwilling to pay for redundancy and high availability. The remaining 40% of small to mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) without a working DRP may find it beneficial to instead create a lightweight application failover plan using existing infrastructure and virtualization technology. This research note discusses:
- Issues surrounding vendor licensing for virtual images of software applications.
- How to manage offsite replicated images/virtual machines.
- Ensuring the virtualized applications work properly should they need to be activated.
In theory, virtualization does provide a low-cost means for application availability. However, the tactical implications of deploying virtualization to replicate critical applications offsite are not to be ignored.