How does virtualization help with disaster recovery within a data center?

Disaster recovery is how a company goes about accessing applications, data, and the hardware that might be affected during a disaster. Virtualization provides hardware independence which means the disaster recovery site does not have to have the exact equipment as the equipment in production. Server provisioning is relevant when a server is built for the first time. Although data centers do have backup generators, the entire data center is designed for disaster recovery. One particular data center could never guarantee that the data center itself would never be without power.

Hardware at the recovery site does not have to be identical to production equipment.

Virtualization abstracts the underlying hardware from the operating systems and applications running on it. In a disaster recovery scenario, this abstraction is extremely beneficial because it allows virtual machines (VMs) to be moved easily between different servers, which may not be identical. This means that the recovery site’s hardware can be different in terms of configuration, make, or model, and still host the VMs from the production environment. This flexibility significantly reduces the complexity and cost associated with maintaining an identical hardware environment at a secondary disaster recovery site.

• Server provisioning is faster. This is true of virtualization in general, as virtual machines can be provisioned much more quickly than physical servers. However, while this does contribute to the overall agility and responsiveness of a disaster recovery strategy, the core benefit in a disaster recovery context is the hardware abstraction mentioned earlier.
• Power is always provided. Virtualization itself does not guarantee power provision; this is typically managed through power supply infrastructure such as uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) and backup generators.
• Less energy is consumed. While virtualization can lead to more efficient use of server resources and potentially reduce energy consumption, this is not directly related to disaster recovery capabilities. It’s more of a side benefit in terms of operational cost savings and sustainability.