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Business continuity with Hyper-V and SC Series
45 Dell EMC SC Series: Microsoft Hyper-V Best Practices | CML1009
8 Business continuity with Hyper-V and SC Series
A good business continuity strategy will always incorporate disaster recovery and disaster avoidance
planning. At a high level, a disaster recovery plan is a process where a company ensures they can recover as
quickly as possible from data loss or from an interruption or failure that prevents access to data. It is a very
important part of overall IT strategy and in some cases is governed by industry-specific regulations.
The disaster recovery scenarios that may be encountered are diverse and may vary by location. Disasters
can be small or large. The loss of a single document that impacts one user is a disaster for that user. A site
failure might impact many users and jeopardize the future of the business if not resolved quickly.
For the most part, the essential elements of disaster recovery are now commonplace, reliable, cost effective,
and easy to implement. They address or prevent most events that are most likely to occur. These protections
and safeguards might include moving key workloads to a cloud provider, tape backups with off-site storage,
on-line backups, disk-to-disk backups, network and physical security measures, malware protection,
redundant hardware and internet connections, SAN-based snapshots with remote replication, and battery
backups or generators.
Business continuity becomes more complicated with size and number of locations. While virtualization
technologies such as Microsoft Hyper-V can help ensure continuity in case of a disaster, they can also add
complexity to the overall design.
8.1 Cost/risk analysis
The most robust disaster recovery solutions might also be cost prohibitive. Each customer must weigh the
costs compared to the risks and determine what level of DR protection is necessary for them. Questions that
might be asked as part of a cost/risk analysis include the following:
• What regulations apply to my industry?
• What are the terms of any service level agreements (SLAs) for business continuity that must be
honored?
• What applications and data are the most mission critical to the business or our customers?
• What is the recovery time objective (RTO) for each application or service? How long can something
be down before the business impact becomes too great? Examples include the following:
- Practice management system: 30 minutes
- Messaging system: 4 hours
- Research and development server: 2 days
• What is the recovery point objective (RPO)? How much data loss is acceptable for a subset of data?
Is backing up the email server once a day adequate? If so, the mail server has an RPO 24 hours,
meaning the potential for up to 24 hours data loss if the mail server is recovered from the last backup.
• What types of events are most likely to occur, factoring in the geographic location? A coastal location
may be subject to hurricanes. A location on a fault line may be subject to earthquakes. A location in a
low area may be prone to flooding.
• Is an alternate site far enough away so that the same event does not impact both locations?
• How much will it cost (hardware, software, and staff) to design, implement and support the desired
protections? Is that cost justified given the risks?