Using virtualization as a disaster recovery strategy can in one of two scenarios:
First scenario is vm to vm. Put a hypervisor at the production site and another at the recovery site. Run the production server in a vm. Replicate the vm drives to the recovery site. During a disaster, boot the vm up on the recovery hypervisor.
The second scenario is bare metal to vm. Put a physical server running on bare metal at the production site. Stage the physical server with the necessary vm drivers (in Hyper-V, this is called the Integration Components.) Put a hypervisor at the recovery site. Replicate the disks. During a disaster, boot the server up as a vm on the recovery hypervisor. The second scenario requires block level replication and the ability for the hypervisor to read native disks. If both of these requirements are not possible, an alternative solution exists. This is to restore the production server into a vm using software that supports VM P2V DR. Examples of this software include Acronis, Arcserve, and Backup Exec. The downside is that this option takes significantly longer.
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