Double-Take Software

Kevin Fogarty wrote a good article on CIO.com about the race to provide P2V conversion products for the rapidly adopted virtualization market.

“Third-party virtualization companies appear to be taking advantage of what are traditionally slow news weeks in the technology business by rushing out a host of products designed to make virtualization infrastructures more manageable, cheaper, and easier to squeeze into previously unappreciated corners of the IT world.”

Double-Take Software is mentioned in the article as providing a “recoverability twist” to the P2V process by capturing the changes to the virtual disk image in real-time. I wouldn’t refer to this as a twist as much as a significant advantage over other P2V conversion products. The challenge of migrations whether it is server, storage or P2V hasn’t changed over the years. The problem is that most P2V conversion products can not capture the changes to the physical server and replicate those changes to the VMDK or VHD file in real time. Typically once the conversion process starts it only captures that server workload state at that specific time. This either requires IT managers to restrict user access from updating that server once the conversion process is started or trying to apply the differential changes from the time the conversion started to completion which can be several hours.  The objective is still to move the workload (OS, Application and associated data) quickly, without downtime and while capturing all changes made.

The Double-Take Virtual Recovery Assistant feature  now included in the award winning Double-Take Move product provides this function of not only converting a physical server to virtual image but captures all the data changes being made to the physical server so there is no need to prevent user access. Migration no longer have to be conducted during weekends with very small change control outage windows, it can run during production hours and easily failover when ready without user or production interruption.