Hot and Cold Cloning of Virtual Machines

Setting up a virtualized work environment often calls for enterprises to contract with a managed services provider who can keep the system running properly once it has been fully installed. Businesses that prefer to use their in-house IT staff for this function will still want to work with a skilled IT consulting firm that can assist them in making the initial transition to virtualization. This is true whether the enterprise has chosen to use Hyper-V or VMware as their primary virtualization platform. One of the decisions that such IT consultants can help the enterprise to make involves the choice of hot and cold cloning technology to be employed during the transition itself.

Here's What Your Business Needs to Know About Hot and Cold Cloning:

Understanding Hot Cloning

In a hot cloning transition, the physical server remains online while the disk image is being created and uploaded onto one of the newly established virtual servers. By keeping the physical server active during the transition, workflow is not disrupted, which means that the process has lower costs in terms of lost productive hours for employees and managers. On the other hand, active use during the process means that some files may change after the disk image has been created but before the transition has been completed.

Understanding Cold Cloning

In a cold cloning transition, data is transitioned while the physical server is disconnected. This eliminates file-change issues but means downtime for the enterprise involved. IT solutions such as virtualization are best administered through a managed services approach in which a company outsources some or all of the IT management responsibility to an IT company. Learn more, by reaching out to iCorps for a free consultation.