Who Invented Virtualization?

Companies like VMware, Oracle, Microsoft,
Citrix, and Red Hat are spreading their seeds of virtualization everywhere. While
VMs are helping FORTUNE 1000 companies and SMBs manage their businesses like
never before, they are also creating challenges for IT when it comes to BC/DR.

So, who invented virtualization? If you
answered VMware you aren’t even close. It was Big Blue. Those of us who got
their starts coding mainframe applications in the late 70s and early 80s
typically dealt with three IBM OS environments: MVS, DOS, and VM. Originally
called CP/CMS (Control Program/Cambridge Monitor System), VM was invented by
IBM at their Cambridge Scientific Center
near Boston and
was basically ‘freeware’ to IBM customers.

Roll forward 30+ years and most surveys
state the percentage of virtualized production systems are at over 50% and growing. Analysts’
predictions put that number at over 60% in just two years. While a backup
administrator’s job was never easy, the virtual server world has made it more
difficult. VMware and all virtualized environments in general change the way we
think about backup and VMDK data recovery. More importantly they force us to
re-access RPO and RTO.

“I am continually amazed by companies who concentrate solely on backup speeds and
feeds,” said Steven B. Aldridge, senior director, global sales and marketing,
ACE Data Recovery. (Ace Data Group
LLC) “One of Fred Moore’s Maxims is
‘Backup is one thing; recovery is everything.’ So, while VMware and other
vendors give you many options to backup your virtual servers, recovering them
properly can be a huge challenge. Data protection tools that are built for
virtualization can go directly to the hypervisor host or virtual infrastructure
management system to find out the names and locations of virtual disks, and
then backup those VMs – all without agents. While virtualization is growing in
popularity, the majority of organizations are not backing up every virtual
server. Over 70% of organizations do not backup all of their virtual servers. On
average, all organizations surveyed backup less than 70% of their virtual
environment.“

In recent months several websites and blogs
have made mention of an issue with VMware backups and restores using their VDDK
toolkit. VMware was very forthcoming about it “… an issue with the VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) that may
cause backup and restore operations to hang or fail. Third-party backup vendors
that are using the VMware VDDK may encounter backup or restore issues when backing
up vSphere environments.“

Symantec
also published a blog
on the issue, in which they suggest that “any 3rd party vendor depending on the
current API cannot perform consistent backups and cannot ensure a reliable
recovery point.“

While the problem with the VDDK does exist
and has not been fixed as of this writing, it is intermittent. Also, similar
issues have existed in previous VDDK versions. It should be noted that
up-and-coming virtualization backup vendor Veeam confirmed that there were
issues present in previous VDDK versions that caused VDDK calls to hang
indefinitely and coding around them. The bottom line is that no matter how you
try and protect your VM environment, hardware, software, or human errors can
still cause recovery issues.

As Scotty said in Star Trek III: “The more they over think the plumbing, the
easier it is to stop up the drain.“

So what other options do VM administrators
have when it comes to VMware data recovery? They need to look into physical
data recovery. Backup and recovery mechanisms are meant to restore data to a
state before a corruption or loss. The same is true with physical data
recovery.

Companies like ACE Data Recovery have over
30 years experience retrieving data from logically or physically damaged media.
They are experts at getting your data back from any media including failed RAID
arrays recovery, SSD, tape, and flash devices. They are also experts in
virtualization, databases, and file systems. What that means to corporations is
that they can handle any type of recovery. It starts with using their custom and
in-house built hardware and software to retrieve an image copy of your data. That
is followed by reassembling that data back into a readable format based upon
RAID type, or the underlying database, or if it was part of a VM.