| Backing Up the Virtual Machine |
| Monday, 27 March 2006 by Michel Roth | |||
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Boston's Suffolk University launched one of the first online MBA programs in 1999. Initially, the school used an application service provider to host its courses, but in 2004, it brought the program fully in-house, using an e-learning system from Blackboard Inc. in Washington. This meant changing the IT infrastructure to boost reliability. "When you have an online program running in-house, you have to make sure the uptime is high enough so professors and students can do their jobs," says Praneeth Machettira, online technical director at Suffolk University's Sawyer School of Management. "Virtualization came in as a way to do disaster recovery." The school used ESX Server from VMware Inc. in Palo Alto, Calif., to create a set of five virtual machines running on ProLiant servers from Hewlett-Packard Co. But although using virtual servers provided some redundancy, it wasn't enough. A standard backup application wasn't adequate either, because of problems with open files and CPU spikes. So instead, Machettira went with Double-Take from NSI Software Inc. to provide full replication in real time of everything taking place on the virtual servers Read more here.
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