Virtual Machine Life cycle Management

Virtual Machines, abbreviated as VMs, are probably one of the smallest levels of granularity in a data center. What is the virtual machine life cycle in cloud computing? The processes includes planning, deploying , managing, protecting, and eliminating.

This small VM may represent an application, a database, a piece of middleware or even a business system, the use of this VM will have a direct impact on the efficiency of the application and business level, if a VM is interrupted or even lost for some reason, it will also cause the user incalculable direct or indirect economic losses.

1. Planning the life cycle of virtual machines

The planning of vm life cycle in cloud computing includes three levels of architecture: business, application and technology. At the business architecture level, the focus is on business requirements and strategic goals. At the application architecture level, the focus is on the design of applications to support business requirements. At the technology architecture level, the focus is on the technology infrastructure to meet the business requirements. Considering these three dimensions together enables a comprehensive and coordinated plan to support the growth and success of the organization.

2. Deploying virtual machine

By integrating inputs from the planning process, you can strategically determine where to deploy VMs based on the operational mechanisms of your business.

3. Managing virtual machines

Traditional virtual machine management is virtualization's own management platform, such as VMware's vCenter, vCenter can only achieve some of the basic management of virtual machines, such as: virtual machine switching, operating system deployment, health management, etc. However, for the management of large numbers of virtual machines, vCenter is obviously unable to help. You still need a complete set of specialized operation and management products to realize:

 Automated deployment of virtual machines

• Health state management of virtual machines

• Interfacing with traditional work order system

• Interfacing with user's original CMDB

• Metering and billing management of massive virtual machines

• Virtual machine elimination, etc.

4. Protecting the virtual machine

Even the smallest virtual machine as long as it is running a production business system, it is also dignified. You have to be responsible for its data security in the end, the most important points for the virtual machine data assurance mechanism are:

• Agentless backup

• Instant recovery

• Disaster recovery replication within acceptable RPO and RTO

• Virtual machine data deduplication and compression, etc.

• Archival query of data

So data protection for VMs still follows the 3-2-1 principle, i.e. 3 copies of data, two media, 1 off-site data protection, etc.

5. Eliminating VM life cycle

Deletion refers to the process in virtual machine management of removing and cleaning up virtual machines that are no longer needed or have become obsolete. The importance of deleting virtual machines lies in resource liberation, performance enhancement, and reducing management costs.

Protect VM during its life cycle with Vinchin

Vinchin backup & Recovery provides a comprehensive solution for virtual machines, from planning to deployment to protection and migration. Moreover, Vinchin supports multiple virtualization platforms for backups, allowing businesses to tailor their needs to their needs, such as VMware、Hyper-V、XCP-ng, etc.

At the same time, Vinchin offers flexible options to customise an enterprise backup strategy according to actual needs. Whether you are a small business or a large organization, Vinchin's VM backup solution can provide a reliable safety net for your virtualized environment. 

Vinchin offers a free 60-day trial for users to experience the functionality in a real-world environment. For more information, please contact Vinchin directly or contact our local partners.

Sum Up

The utilization of VM should be well designed in enterprises to increase production efficiency and avoid resource waste. In cloud computing, the life cycle of virtual machine includes planning, deploying , managing, protecting, and eliminating.

To protect virtual environment, companies can select Vinchin Backup & Recovery to easily backup the popular virtual machines.