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This chapter discusses the use of Dell SRDF technology to provide disaster restart protection for a VMware environment on PowerMax.
The VMware virtualization platform virtualizes the physical infrastructure into a pool of resources. Virtual machines are presented with a virtual hardware environment independent of the underlying physical hardware. This feature enables organizations to leverage disparate physical hardware in the environment and provide a low total cost of ownership. The virtualization of the physical hardware can also be used to create disaster recovery and business continuity solutions that would have been impractical otherwise.
These solutions usually involve a combination of virtual environments at one or more geographically separated data centers and Dell remote replication technology. One example of such architecture has physical servers running various business applications in their primary data center while the secondary data center has a limited number of virtualized physical servers. During normal operations, the physical servers in the secondary data center are used for supporting workloads such as QA and testing. If there is a disruption in services at the primary data center, the physical servers in the secondary data center run the business applications in a virtualized environment. The focus of this chapter is a discussion of these types of solutions.