How does server virtualization play into remote server management? Are there any benefits or drawbacks for disaster recovery?
If you're not currently using server virtualization, but you want to get better economy out of your disaster recovery site, and you're willing to risk degraded performance, it makes sense to at least have your remote site run on virtual machines. You'll want to try to get as many servers as you can to fit into a slightly smaller footprint, especially if you're going to have a site that's completely idle. If you're only planning on using that site in the case of a bad disaster, then it makes more sense to have those machines be virtual.
Depending on what virtualization software you're using, there's a lot of products that nowadays can have it either up and running, or even something with SAN replication, you can have the data associated with the virtual machines already set up on the remote site. If you already use virtualization, then you get even more benefits because it's a lot easier to duplicate your current environment somewhere else.
What if you're working on a budget? Is there a way to get similar benefits of a remote site at a lower cost?
The one thing that's most important to most people is the data. Depending on how much downtime your business can sustain, most people build data centers because they figure the cost it would take to build something from scratch in the event the first data center goes completely black, (for example, a fire wipes out all the servers) is too high.
It may be enough to have archival backup. For a very small business, it might be as simple as going to tape or disk backup that you ship elsewhere instead of having servers. You may also be able to take advantage of some sort of cloud computing depending on your applications, so you have at least something out there that can continue running at least part of your business.
