I have been looking around for some time for virtualization solutions for our school network. The primary reasoning behind this is that I believe that virtual machines provide a much easier method for disaster recovery. If you have a Windows Server virtualized (i.e. your Active Directory Domain Controllers) they essentially are all contained within a single file. This makes backing up the entire machine very straight forward, and would allow versioning of your backups. For example if your physical server went down, you can quickly move the backup of the Virtual Machine (VM) to another server and have it up and running in minutes. Also if you version your backups, you could backup the entire VM ahead of a major upgrade, and if it all goes horribly wrong, simply revert back to the backup. Read the rest of this entry »
