Improve SLA on EOS or EOL Hardwares

This post is useful for People Managing large Data centers and have some server instances running on Old hardware (EOL or EOS). if you think you don't have, Please re-look at your server inventory or CMDB database :).

so what is the risk associated ? , Well if server Hardware dies due to any reason You just can't meet server uptime SLA - Why ? some of you may say.. well our backup policy is really good, we will arrange New/Old hardware and restore :).. so far it sounds really good. Let me ask you this , How Many times you were able to restore system state backup on different Hardware ? :)... I know the percentage is fairly low because of not underlying Hardware but the Operating System (Windows guys are main victim of this)

so what is the solution:-

• Simple Solution is to refresh the Hardware , but have no budget left :) - Very common

• Virtualize the server :- Excellent Idea, but what if Application running on top of it is resource hungry.

• 1:1 Virtualization :- I think this approach can help you to some degree in re-mediating Hardware failure and at the same time Application can get same level of resources due to 1:1 ratio. I know you may see some upfront investment but that's not true because standalone Hypervisors are Freely available.

Just to Conclude , We are abstracting the Hardware layer so that in event of Hardware failure we can replace it with any Make/Model. One of my friend asked me , what if the server VHD/VMDK is sitting on Local disk and the Disk fails... Very good Question.. Well Hardware abstraction is going to give you mobility which does not mean you would stop talking backup of the server. But now Backup is different , its not the whole system state , its a Backup of a file (VHD/VMDK) - which has server and installed application.. isn't it. Restore of single file is easy and faster than complete system state backup with 1000s of files.

so.. what will happen in event of Hardware failure.. This is what you need to do

• Bring new/old Hardware.
• Installed Standalone Hypervisor.
• Restore the VHD/VMDK
• Power on the VM (You may need to restore some. incremental files depending on the Backup Policy.

I hope this is informative.

Cheers!!

Pankaj