More organizations relocating virtual objects for secure operations

One of the most popular features in a virtual environment is the ability to relocate or move VMs between servers and even between data centers. For the most part, this has been functionality that IT wants to have in its virtualization products just in case, but rarely activates. Lately however, I am getting examples of organizations regularly using live relocation in their day-to-day operations.

• Virtual storage allows IT to move snapshots of important data and reference application images to backup data centers. One enterprise I talked with automatically does this multiple times a day so that if anything happens the business can operate on data and VMs that have only aged a few hours. This practice can significantly reduce the business disruption caused by a major data center outage without adding a lot of cost.
• Moving VMs periodically ensures that business continuity/disaster recovery activity is normal business process. Treating outages as a special one-time event causes errors and heightened risk of greater adverse business impact. Rotating VMs between data centers every once in a while keeps the application loads in balance and makes a catastrophic event in the data center decidedly less exciting.
• Relocating VMs can help reduce the chance of malware lurking in production environments. Newly provisioned VMs are created from IT supplied reference images that comply with corporate policies for version, patch level, and security scans. Furthermore, infections in applications disappear when the VM is refreshed from the reference image. The risk of an attack lying undiscovered for months on end while it siphons off sensitive data is eliminated simply because the application transitions to a clean image.

Now I do not for a moment recommend that mission critical applications be moved willy-nilly, or that IT dive into a motion program without first trying it out. However, it does make sense to relocate virtual storage structures (e.g. data, applications, VMs) and to occasionally move virtual applications as a best practice to keep centralized data centers as up to date as possible. Virtualization frees applications from the binds of a physical infrastructure - live relocation experience will help apply this freedom to a more efficient business with real security benefits.