NetApp Article Sample

When you consolidate servers, you also consolidate risk. If you take 10 or more physical servers and consolidate them onto a single VMware ESX server, you eliminate a lot of physical complexity, but you put a lot of eggs in one basket. Protection levels that seemed adequate for standalone servers may be exposing your operations to unnecessary risks.

Here are a few quick quiz questions to ask yourself: • Is my infrastructure as robust as it could be? Outside of the server itself, such things as RAID-protected storage, replicas, redundant HBAs, networks, SANs, and so on can improve resiliency. • Are my backups consistent at both the application and VM level? For performance, VMs and many common applications cache data in memory. This information has to be flushed to disk, writes to the file system must be temporarily suspended, and the application or VM has to be quiesced to create a consistent backup. More than one early adopter of VMware was surprised to discover that the backups they were creating were not consistent. A consistent backup allows operations tobe restarted when a backup is restored. • Am I backing up my data frequently enough? With more applications tied to a single server, you may need to increase your backup frequency, providing multiple recovery points. • Is the backup workload on my ESX server affecting business operations? You can’t afford to have backups running outside of your designated backup window and slowing down your business.

A careful review of these questions may reveal some hidden gotchas in your backup plan.