SMB Disaster Recovery Planning Worksheet
August 29, 2011
Quite a bit of the work I do is with small and medium businesses. Far too few businesses in the SMB market have adequate, formal, and tested disaster recovery plans. Too often the plan goes something like this: “Call the IT guy when something breaks, evacuate gear if a hurricane is coming, and panic if anything else happens.”
Thankfully, you can do better. If you have no formal plan, now is an excellent time to get started, and I have published a basic DR planning worksheet for small businesses to use as a starting point.
Grab a copy of the Small Business Disaster Recovery Planning Worksheet and begin working through your specific business needs and concerns.
If you need help in getting started or in reviewing your existing plans, contact me today.
Why A Client Hypervisor Matters More Than You Realize
June 12, 2009
In the not-too-distant future, the availability of solid client hypervisors will dramatically shift the way we deliver IT, particularly in the SMB space. This XenClient page at Citrix.com does a great job demonstrating this. Be sure to watch the video while you’re there.
The client hypervisor’s impact will quickly eclipse the impact of the server hypervisor in many ways:
- Consumerization: A common client hypervisor will be the platform by which IT can fulfill the promises of consumerization. A new employee already has a personal laptop? Great, just load the corporate VM onto their machine alongside their personal VM. Eventually we may even be able to do the same thing with their phone (see VMWare’s Mobile Virtualization Platform).
- Standardization: With a hypervisor abstracting the physical host, a single VM image can be deployed across dissimilar hardware platforms, radically expanding the application of standardization. Rather than needing a separate client image for each hardware model, images can be created based directly on the usage case without regard for the underlying hardware. This will further align the standard image to the user’s needs.
- Security: The ability to isolate tasks of dissimilar natures into separate VMs at the client endpoint will provide an additional layer of protection. For a task such as web browsing, which must be considered inherently risky, I would look to stand up and tear down a VM on a regular basis, possibly per session.
- Flexibility: Hardware upgrades could become as simple as copying a VM from one machine to another. The IT department could easily issue a “loaner” PC or laptop for the user’s VM to run on while physical failures are fixed.
While client hypervisors will inevitably introduce new and complex problems of their own, I look forward to the opportunity to apply them to solve real problems in new and elegant ways.