One of VMBlog's members, Frane Borozan, is doing what he can to try and help the virtualization community at large.  Frane has taken up the charge for system administrators everywhere by designing a cheap solution to do backup disaster recovery using virtualization.  In this project, he plans on using free tools and scripts that he has written specifically for virtual backup.  The project is using VMware software such as VMware Server (used for managing data that is imported into virtual machines) and VMware Importer (used for importing data into virtual machines).

Frane writes:

I will here describe whole process of implementation of virtual servers into your current network infrastructure. With virtualization you will get virtual failover servers and you will have fresh replica of all of your important data, so in case main servers failure you will have fast disaster recovery plan that just works. Of course you can have clusters in your network infrastructure but what is the cost of managing clusters and paying licenses for that expensive kind on in stable software.
There are always savings into hardware and power consumption, imagine now you need to have one physical for every server you own if you want to have good disaster recovery plan, with this you can have dozen of backups on the same server and you will run only backup that is needed in case of the disaster.

big.picture.of project

Main sense of whole project is to keep employees work without interruption caused by server hardware. This process provides low cost failover solution without datacenters or clusters or expensive special hardware and software.
Please note that this project is not best for all server backups, the best would be to contact me with extensive network, servers and data types information and I will suggest is this good solution for you.

Chapters

The HOWTO is divided up into the following chapters:
1. Planned network infrastructure
2. Making copy of physical server into virtual using VMware converter GUI
3. Making copy of physical server into virtual with command line p2vtool and preparing XML file needed for VMware p2vtool
4. Bat script for automation of VMware converter import process
5. Customizing VMware configuration file
6. Running and testing virtual server using cold and hot methods
7. Restoring network configuration to virtual network adapters
8. Automating VMware server take over process
9. Restoring virtual newly created data to new physical servers

Go and check out this great project, here.  And be sure to thank Frane for his hard work.  We have extremely intelligent and giving people in our virtualization community.  And that's one of the silent reasons why virtualization is spreading like it is.  Great work Frane!  And thank you very much for allowing me to share this with the rest of VMBlog readers.

-David