AvailabilityTag Archive

One of the first steps in preparing for a Business Continuity Plan and developing a Disaster Recovery Plan is to first identify the impact that your business would experience as the result of a disaster. Engage with senior management (as this process takes up considerable time and needs focus and… Continue Reading Business Impact Analysis questionnaire template

You may be one of the many people who ask what is the difference between BCP and DR – that is, what is the difference between a Business Continuity Plan and Disaster Recovery planning? First a little history – back in the pre-computing era, for most businesses, if they suffered… Continue Reading The difference between BCP and DR

If you have implemented VMware VM Monitoring (part of HA), and your virtual machine rebooted quickly, you may not know why the virtual machine rebooted. Most often this is due to a Windows bluescreen, but you may want to see why VMware HA took the action to reboot the VM.… Continue Reading Why did my VM reboot?

Some people will just jump straight into Disaster Recovery Planning, without considering what they are planning for – how do you categorise a disaster? Who  decides, and what information do they need to make a decision? What parts of your business can continue to operate using other means – that… Continue Reading Disaster Recovery planning to do before the planning

How do you make VMs automatically start after an outage? You may want a virtual machine to start by itself when a host is powered on, to maintain availability of the service of that VM – particularly if you don’t have a VMware High Availability cluster (like a single ESXi… Continue Reading Configuration of VM auto-start options for Service Machines

How long does it take you to boot up a server? I don’t just mean the time it takes to start Windows or Linux, I mean the time it takes the hardware to begin starting Windows. Next time you reboot a physical server, go and time it – you won’t… Continue Reading Hidden benefits of virtualisation – reboot time and the impact on server availability and regular operations

VMware are often focussing on the latest and greatest features and capabilities offered by their newest software. Of course, they are always driving forward and the next version’s enhancements and benefits are forefront of their minds – but there are still some people out there who are just starting on… Continue Reading Hidden benefits of VMware – uneven hardware

If you build a cluster for a VMware virtualised infrastructure, you can use almost any compute resource that you have available. Do you want to mix a Dell R710 dual CPU host with 32 GB of RAM with an IBM BladeCenter Hx5 with a single CPU and 96GB – sure,… Continue Reading SDDC drives mix and match hardware

How can I get my server ready for the transformation from a physical server to a virtual server? The physical to virtual conversion can be done with a suite of tools, but need to be prepared carefully. Many people don’t know how to prepare for a P2V – or even… Continue Reading The right way to prepare for P2V