One of the best things about virtualization is that it substantially reduces the cost of creating a disaster recovery plan. This means that not only is it less expense to set up a disaster recovery strategy, the number of applications that can be covered under that plan can be greatly increased.

In a How the University of Texas Averted IT Disaster during Hurricane Dolly webinar presented by VMware, the inherent disaster recovery benefits of virtualization are discussed in some detail.

The discussion is led mostly by Brian Matthews and Alejandro Herrera, two system administrators from the University of Texas in Brownsville. They describe how as Hurricane Dolly was getting ready to descend on the Texas gulf region, they were able to take a Microsoft SharePoint application that kept students and faculty informed of events on campus and dynamically move it to a set of backup servers located at the university’s Austin campuses. This approach eliminates the need to have a dedicated backup data center facility and all the associated costs will setting that facility up.

Ibby Rahmani, senior product marketing manager for VMware, describes the various levels of backup and recovery options that are available using VMware, ranging from simply provisioning a new server to deploying high-availability and fault-tolerance options.

Unfortunately, one of the speakers gets cut off about three-quarters of the way through the event.

Rating: Good overview of the implications of virtualization on disaster recovery scenarios