Disaster Recovery – not a nightmare with virtualization

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Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:24:05 GMT

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re: Disaster Recovery – not a nightmare with virtualization

porourke — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:27:18 GMT

Question submitted over the weekend: "Would you mind explaining how you make these Golden images? Are you just using Trumbull's script to suspend VMs then VSS it then resume the VMs?"

Chris' reply:

"In regards to making golden images, the process is relatively straight forward (more on that in a moment).

With that background, when we are developing a program for the first time, we provision a clean / fresh VM for creation in our development environment. If we are updating an existing program, we will often use the existing production golden image and begin development at this point.

The VM purpose will determine the starting configuration of Windows Server 2003 that we install (we have a pre-existing image of an IIS server, for example, that is already hardened and correctly patched). The application is developed on the VM, and the same VM is promoted through dev, then to QA and finally into production. At the time the VM is ready to be released to production, the VM is added to the golden image store as the most recent and updated release. As each application usually requires more than a single instance running in production, all instances of the VM are copied from the golden image VM store. This is also the point when the new golden image is replicated to the disaster recovery environment.

I would also add that when we initially adopted virtualization (this was over 5 years ago now, so the circumstances have changed a bit), we had to decide the best methodology for managing the individual VMs in our environment. We realized almost immediately that the simplified provisioning process using Microsoft Virtual Server could create a situation where rouge VMs could be provisioned with next to no effort (this was a specific issue in our QA and development environments) especially since management tools such as SCVMM did not yet exist.

Therefore, we made a decision to treat all VMs just as we would treat every other physical machine in our environment: as a separate and wholly different instance of the operating system, at least from a provisioning and management point of view."

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