Hypervisor Replication: What Is It and How Does It Work?

What is Hypervisor-Based Replication?

Hypervisor-based replication or hypervisor replication is a technique that provides and manages data replication of the hypervisor layer beforehand.

Hypervisor-based replication provides automated replicas for virtual machines and their storage.

Businesses are now increasingly adopting the virtualization technology, and hypervisor-based replication helps organizations with the challenges faced in their infrastructure.

With every move, the organization’s data increases rapidly. So, for the ever-growing data, a firm needs a replication process that is not dependent on the hardware platform.

The process of hypervisor-based replication saves and protects your virtual environment content.

By eliminating the need to replicate via physical elements, it provides businesses a hardware-neutral solution—this way, the disaster recovery platform delivers superior protection.

Top 5 Hypervisors Replication Vendors-

1. EMC RecoverPoint
2. Rubrik
3. Veeam Backup & Replication
4. VMware SRM
5. Zerto

Also Read: List of 6 Best Open Source Data Replication Tools

How Does Hypervisor Replication Work?

Hypervisor-based replication acquires data and creates its replica at the hypervisor level. It elevates business continuity and disaster recovery by self-automating the content storage at the virtual machine disk format level right away.

Thus, it eliminates the system backup requirement for hardware and storage.

Unlike the traditional processes, this replication is an ongoing and fully automated backup process.

It means that the hypervisor-based replication process saves your data almost instantly, even before virtualization, without generating any system downtime.

A hypervisor is an element in the infrastructure layer that allows a physical server to run multiple VMs.

Hypervisors-based replication levels up the BC/DR process (Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery) process by utilizing the hypervisor.

Hypervisors-based replication software provides backup and workload mobility for virtualized infrastructures and cloud environments.

Hypervisors-based replication doesn’t need any backup time scheduling like the traditional replication processes.

It’s a real-time replication, where the process is moved up a notch to the hypervisors layer from the storage layer. It is a hardware-agnostic continuous replication process.

Without raising any negative impact on storage latency and production performance, hypervisors-based replication supports all the virtualization capabilities.

It is an effective disaster recovery solution that captures the content before it even reaches the storage layer.

Advantages of Hypervisors Replication

1. It is a highly scalable solution with second to none granularity.
2. It boils the storage footprint down to a very significant level.
3. It gives real-time continuous data protection without any need for backups scheduling, unlike the snapshot technology.
4. It generates optimal results in data backup, superior disaster recovery, and workload mobility for cloud and virtualization environments.
5. It is a hardware-neutral process, meaning it is entirely independent of the physical system and its resources.
6. It has a simple setup process and rapid deployment, no matter the infrastructural size and data consumption speed.
7. Be it a clustered or a standalone server, there is minimal to zero downtime with a quick recovery rate.
8. Keeps the data in sync and offers Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) in quick time for BC/DR.
9. The process generates financial viability and increases efficiency while reducing storage requirements.

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