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6: A Most-Significant Step—“Virtualizing” Your IT Systems 107

information security in new ways. But of all the concerns about implement-
ing virtual server environments, performance comes out on top, although
collectively, storage management issues are also of great concern.

Data Protection
It’s not surprising that end users expect server virtualization and consoli-
dation to reduce the total number of backup licenses they have to purchase.
(Almost a quarter of the survey respondents reported that they reduce the
number of backup licenses after deploying virtual servers.) To that end, a
variety of vendors eliminate the need to have backup agents on every virtual
machine. And in a related survey finding, 17 percent of the users have
changed their backup software as a direct result of implementing server vir-
tualization.

Disaster Recovery

Improving disaster recovery is one of the driving forces behind the combi-
nation of server virtualization and networked storage. In the ESG survey, 26 ptg
percent of the virtual server users said they replicate virtual machines to a
remote disaster-recovery site, and another 39 percent plan to do so. One of
the advantages of server virtualization is that it enables users to replicate
many servers to relatively inexpensive virtual machines rather than to physi-
cal servers, which significantly reduces the primary barrier to disaster recov-
ery: high costs. In addition, disaster recovery with virtual machines can be
less costly than with physical servers because the process can, in many cases,
be managed by the virtualization software.
A primary driving force behind remote replication in the context of server
virtualization is end users’ desire to reduce their recovery time objectives
(RTO). For example, 85 percent of the survey respondents agree that replicat-
ing virtual machine images for disaster recovery enables their organizations
to lower their RTO.

Server and Storage Virtualization
Although server virtualization and storage virtualization are usually
viewed separately by IT organizations, the clear trend is toward a merging of
the two technologies. The primary benefits of server virtualization include
lower costs, improved resource utilization, nondisruptive upgrades, and
increased availability—all of which are fundamentally enabled by decoupling