Virtualisation aids disaster recovery

While most of the buzz around server virtualisation in general, and VMware Infrastructure in particular, have been about server consolidation and greening the data centre, disaster recovery may be the IT area where server virtualisation technology has the biggest impact, says SearchStorage.

Disaster recovery (DR) planning for mission-critical applications historically called for replicating the data for these applications and having servers standing by at the DR site ready to take over at a moment's notice.

Most organisations can save money by virtualising these standby servers. A single offsite server can act as the standby domain controller, SQL server, Exchange server and several more. Not only can you save the cost of all those physical servers, but also the rack space and power charges from your DR site.

Users planning to run Microsoft Exchange on Windows Server 2008 and those contemplating in-place upgrades of the new server operating system coming out next week may face installation problems unless they heed specific advice from Microsoft, says CIO.

The vendor is already warning users that the RTM version of Exchange 2007 cannot be installed on Windows Server 2008 and that it is impossible to do an in-place upgrade to Windows Server 2008 on a server running Exchange 2007 SP1.

Microsoft also has said "rolling upgrades" of failover clusters for Exchange are impossible. Microsoft has published three migration options, including one long set of steps around off-loading data, uninstalling and reinstalling numerous Exchange components.

Norwood School in the US has selected Objectworld UC Server for unified communications, says TMCnet.

This latest selection of the Objectworld UC Server will provide unified communications to the faculty and staff members of the school district.

Norwood School administrators view school safety and staff responsiveness as paramount. The school required a simple-to-use solution that allowed faculty to access faxes, e-mail and voice messages through a single interface from a tablet or BlackBerry device.