Even basic virtualisation goes some way towards DR & BC since a Virtual Machine (VM), by its very nature, is hardware agnostic and can hence be easily moved from one physical server to another.  Thus, if the hardware running a VM fails and a copy of the VM has been made, DR can be as simple as starting the VM on the replacement hardware.

Clearly, the speed of recovery depends upon hardware availability, time taken to copy VMs (which can be very large), etc. and this process can be improved practically to the point of instantaneous recovery using VMware's Infrastructure 3 platform.

With VMware Infrastructure 3, Cantarus can deliver an infrastructure where VMs can automatically move from a failed physical server to an operational one and restart - without any human intervention.  Impressive as this is, it is only the beginning of what can be achieved.  Live VMs can be seamlessly moved from one physical server to another without service interruption enabling hardware maintenance to be carried out invisibly to users.  Equally, this can be fully automatic to enable services to continue even if an unexpected total failure of a physical server occurs.

The VMware video to the right gives a comprehensive overview of these capabilities and what they can do for your business.  Simply click the video thumbnail to open the player.