Double-Take announced the availability of its Virtual Recovery Assistant, a new enhancement to Double-Take for Windows that simplifies the process of migrating to VMware ESX virtual machines by automating the provisioning of the virtual environment and reducing end-user downtime associated with traditional physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration products. The new feature can also be used to automate the protection of workloads running on physical servers, moving them to virtual machines automatically in the event of a server outage or site-wide disaster.

“By leveraging server virtualization, IT organizations have realized they’re able to address previously unmet needs, such as cost-effective remote disaster recovery,” stated Lauren Whitehouse, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Performing P2V- or V2V-based replication with Double-Take and the new Virtual Recovery Assistant can deliver significant improvements over tape-based recoveries, especially lowering recovery time objectives.”

One of the major barriers to moving existing physical servers into virtual machines is the downtime associated with the migration. Existing tools lack real-time data replication capabilities and require the physical server to be taken offline for several hours while the data is moved to the new virtual machine. Because Double-Take and the Virtual Recovery Assistant can replicate changes to data in real-time, end users can continue to access production applications right up until the moment at which the workload is migrated.

"Most organizations understand the benefits of moving to a virtualized environment but can’t afford the downtime associated with migrations or don’t have the time or resources required to move their workloads from the physical world to a virtual one," said Bob Roudebush, director of solutions engineering at Double-Take Software. "This new feature essentially eliminates the costly downtime associated with migrations. P2V migrations shouldn’t require a Ph.D. in rocket science."

The Double-Take Virtual Recovery Assistant reduces the complex, often manual, steps required to ready the new virtualized environment for migration. It does the work of provisioning the target virtual machine for the user- eliminating the need to setup the new virtual machine, install an operating system, patches or applications. For workloads which need more room to grow the Virtual Recovery Assistant also allows users to increase parameters such as disk capacity, allocated memory, and the number of processors available to the application once it is running in a virtual machine.

"Our team is currently working on a virtual machine migration project. When we learned about the functionality and robustness of the Virtual Recovery Assistant, we decided to incorporate it into the project as well,” said Ted Archer, global network manager at Littelfuse. “By utilizing the Virtual Recovery Assistant, we were able to reduce overall project costs, minimize internal resource consumption, and decrease the overall project timeline.”

The Double-Take Virtual Recovery Assistant is available immediately as a feature of the latest release of Double-Take for Windows and provides:

• Effortless migration from physical systems or other virtualization platforms to virtual machines running on VMware Infrastructure.
• Reduced hardware expenses and improved manageability by virtualizing existing physical production and disaster recovery servers on VMware Infrastructure
• Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by reducing the number of software licenses required at the disaster recovery site when used for protection of physical systems
• Simplified protection by automating the installation of Double-Take on production systems and the provisioning of disaster recovery virtual machines.