Virtualized disaster recovery (DR) plans provide more reliable protection for critical IT assets compared to traditional DR solutions. Key benefits of virtualized DR include lower costs through infrastructure consolidation, fully automated recovery processes, and the ability to frequently test plans without disruption. The document provides steps for organizations to establish an effective virtualized DR strategy, including identifying critical applications and data, virtualizing key systems, setting recovery objectives, automating recovery triggers, and selecting a DR solution vendor.

1. Quick-Start Guide to Disaster Recovery
An IT disaster can significantly harm your business
Events beyond your control—and even planned events—can
drastically affect your business in the following ways:
• Loss of revenue from your customers’ inability to do business
with you
• Diminished market credibility, your customers’ trust—even a total
loss of business
• Penalties for violating service-level agreements (SLAs) with your
partners, suppliers, distributors and franchisees
• Costs to recover and repair the lost data
• Legal costs of meeting internal and external compliance
requirements
In fact, consider the following statistics:
• 43% of companies that experience disasters never re-open, and 29%
close within two years1
• 93% of businesses that lost their data center for 10 days went
bankrupt within one year2
• 40% of all companies that experience a major disaster will go out of
business if they cannot gain access to their data within 24 hours3
Are you prepared for a disaster? Is your enterprise able to meet
its recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives
(RTOs)?
Why deploy a virtualized disaster recovery (DR) plan?
Until reliable virtualization management solutions became available
several years ago, DR solutions fell well short of satisfying business
requirements:
• It was too expensive to deploy a second failover site with dedicated
resources
• Recovery plans were too complex
• DR procedures were too unreliable
In fact, virtualization is now a fundamental and critical aspect of a
successful DR plan. Virtualized environments are much easier to
recover, migrate and manage because they simplify the hardware and
software infrastructure and allow standardization of processes. And
with built-in intelligence, planning and automation of the recovery
procedures become much more reliable and repeatable.
Take the first steps
How do you start the journey to build an intelligent virtual
infrastructure as a reliable and cost-effective platform to protect your
IT assets? Here are six steps to get you started:
Identify your most critical applications and data.
What applications directly generate revenue, maintain
safety or are otherwise critical to business continuity?
What data is absolutely critical for your customers,
your internal accounting and finances, or compliance?
Virtualize your key applications.
This will not only reduce operational and maintenance
costs by removing unnecessary infrastructure and
software, but your environment will be simpler and
better suited for effective DR planning.
Agree on the target RTO and RPO.
What data can you lose? For how long? When do you
want to be back online with your critical applications?
Make sure your goals are realistic.
Define the triggers for DR to bring all the
planned activities to action.
This can be a business decision based on the data you
are getting, or a technical event that automatically
triggers a recovery.
Identify the DR replication, failover and failback
options you want to implement.
The resulting solution will be a compromise between
the level of protection, the speed of recovery and
the costs.
Select the solution vendor.
Beware of vendors pushing specific hardware or
operating system or other limiting choices that don’t
align well with your existing or planned environment.
Study the level of your team’s expertise required to
maintain the solution, or the amount of resources you
need to allocate. Make sure you can test the solution
without waiting for the actual disaster.
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1
[Source] McGladrey and Pullen
2
[Source] National Archives Records Administration
3
Gartner, March 2009
As with many enterprises today, your data center houses the critical IT components—hardware, data and
software—that your business depends on. But are they fully secure and protected from potential disasters?
Your data center’s health and fault tolerance rely on many factors unrelated to your IT environment, such as
natural disasters, devious intruders, security procedures or partner service interruptions.
While many organizations don’t plan to be victims of an IT disaster, their goal is to mitigate the risk if one does
occur.

2. Copyright © 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.
To learn more about how VMware solutions can take your business-critical applications to a new level, visit
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VMware: a trusted name in virtualization and
cloud infrastructure
You know VMware as the leading virtualization company for over a
decade. In fact, according to Gartner, more than 80% of all virtualized
applications in the world run on VMware today. But did you know
that VMware also offers the simplest, most reliable disaster recovery
solution to protect all of your virtualized applications?
VMware has the right DR plan for you
You can mitigate your risks by implementing an automated DR
solution from VMware to protect your critical IT assets. A well-
designed DR solution can provide the required RTO and RPO while
keeping the costs in check. Your DR plans can be tested in a non-
disruptive way while benefiting your IT department in areas beyond
the typical DR needs. The VMware DR solution delivers these benefits:
• Efficiency—Virtualization enables infrastructure consolidation at
the failover site. Less costly replication options are more broadly
available, packaged with lower-end storage appliances or as stand-
alone software solutions. With these advances, VMware DR can
protect major large-scale data centers and the most mission-critical
IT assets, as well as smaller sites and Tier 2 applications.
• Automation—The VMware DR solution can automatically execute
and coordinate all the steps required to ensure the desired level
of protection. Traditional runbooks—no longer good enough to
manage recovery plans—have been replaced with software-driven
recovery plans. Setting up a recovery plan in a virtual environment is
as simple as selecting RPOs and RTOs for each business service.
• Reliability—VMware DR provides the ability to test recovery
plans frequently and in a non-disruptive manner. Manual recovery
processes are replaced with automated recovery, eliminating the risk
associated with user errors while ensuring predictable recovery. As a
result, you’ll be better able to meet your RPO and RTO objectives in
the event of a failover.
We hope you will never experience a disaster. But prominent
enterprises like yours still need to be prepared by having the right
solution in place to manage both planned and unplanned downtime.
VMware has helped many enterprises and is here to help you.
Site A (Primary)
Servers
VMware
vCenter Server
Site Recovery
Manager
VMware vSphere
Servers
Site B (Recovery)
VMware
vCenter Server
Site Recovery
Manager
VMware vSphere
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager automates failover and
migration processes for reliable recovery