Business continuity exercises have always been complicated and hard to exercise. There is significant planning involved to test the availability and recovery of the IT workloads and usually requires extensive downtime and effort from IT managers. Virtualization technology has helped IT managers with this process but that is primarily only for local high availability testing at the primary data center. The roll of a business continuity planner is to exercise the entire IT infrastructure and verify the workloads can be recovered and run at a functional level to restore critical business operations.

Double-Take® Software released a three part Double-Take for Hyper-V video webinar with a demo of the product functionality and how it can provide an extreme benefit to business continuity exercises by creating the ability to spin up the virtual machines at the disaster recovery facility without bringing down the production systems. This technology will significantly benefit business continuity exercises so they can be conducted on a more regular basis versus just once or twice a year. This provides those companies that have been reluctant to test their business continuity plans because of the down time required a live failover and recovery test of the critical workloads all while keeping production systems online.
Here are additional business continuity benefits that Double-Take for Hyper-V provides:

• Live Disaster Recovery Test without production downtime: Double-Take for Hyper-V allows you to bring up a replicated virtual machine in testing mode to make sure it works without affecting the production environment and then shut it back down and resume protection of the production workload
• Live Migration over Geographical distances: Double-Take for Hyper-V allows you to replicate and failover Hyper-V virtual machines in real-time locally or over geographic distances without the expense and complexity of other solutions.
• Select and protect virtual machines on a VM-by-VM basis, allowing you to protect and recover a single virtual machine or all virtual machines on a specified Hyper-V host
• Replicate and Failover Virtual Machines to different Hyper-V hosts in different locations: One set of virtual machines can be replicated to and failover to a Hyper-V host in one city while another set of virtual machines can be replicated to and failover to a Hyper-V host in an entirely different city.

All of this functionality not only ensures the availability of Hyper-V infrastructure it will also allow IT managers to better manage their virtual infrastructure. This should be welcome news to business continuity managers who have been met with resistance to test the recovery of the IT workloads due to previous downtime requirements. Now, business continuity exercises can be performed on a more regular basis to help meet those industry compliance regulations like HIPAA, SOX and SEC.

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