VM sprawl has the potential to be a large security risk, requiring careful management, concurs Seth Robinson, director, technology analysis, at the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), which just released its Ninth Annual Information Security Trends study. "Beyond that, the risk of data loss due to human error or hardware failure is much higher, since there are many machines relying on a single set of resources." While there are techniques for recovering virtual data, he says, "this is somewhat of a specialized skill and may need to be outsourced if a company doesn't have skills in-house."
Howard Marks, chief scientist at Networks Are Our Lives, a Hoboken, N.J.-based consultancy, says another issue is that "virtual machines are much more intimate with each other than physical machines,'' and when a physical server becomes a virtual server, it's often on the same virtual server host as all the other virtual servers or group of virtual servers, which can wreak havoc if the backup architecture isn't restructured.
"Not backing up a virtual server becomes a cost issue when you have to do data reconstruction,'' he says. "What backup does is have a reporting engine that can collect data from all the backup applications and from your virtual environment, and produce reports that say, 'This is the state of the backup of all your servers,' so they integrate the physical with the virtual in one report."
Hurley agrees that one of the biggest concerns organizations have about adopting VMs on a widespread basis is that it "breaks backup." Since users can create VMs on their own, she says, it is easy to interfere with standard backup processes. "Unfortunately, when VMs get spun up, those responsible for backup aren't always aware," she says. "The application user may or may not have set up even minimal protection such as snapshots. It is quite possible that whatever data is on those VMs will never be protected, and therefore never recoverable."
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