Keeping business-critical services online is no longer just about having backups. While backups are essential for long-term retention and recovery, they don’t always meet the strict recovery time and recovery point objectives required by modern datacenters. That’s where real-time data replication comes in.
In NAKIVO's latest guide, you can read about real-time replication for virtual machines and learn how it helps organizations minimize downtime and data loss during outages, cyber incidents, or infrastructure failures. The focus is on virtualized environments, where replication is significantly easier to implement than in traditional physical infrastructures and delivers much faster recovery.
Real time data replication continuously synchronizes changes from a production virtual machine to its replica, often within seconds. This approach is typically used to protect the most critical workloads—systems where even a few minutes of downtime or data loss can have serious business consequences. When a failure occurs, organizations can fail over to a replica that already contains the latest data, restoring services quickly and keeping operations running.
The post explains the two main approaches to replication: synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous replication writes data to both the primary VM and its replica simultaneously, enabling near-zero data loss. This method is ideal for mission-critical workloads but requires high-performance, low-latency network connections and can impact write performance. Asynchronous replication, on the other hand, transfers changes at defined intervals. It is more flexible, works over longer distances, and is easier to implement, though it may result in some data lag depending on the replication schedule.
Beyond theory, the article emphasizes that real-time replication should not be applied blindly to every virtual machine. Not all workloads are equally important, and replicating everything in real time can quickly become expensive and resource-intensive. Instead, organizations should assess data criticality, acceptable downtime, and infrastructure capabilities to decide which VMs truly need real-time protection and which can rely on traditional backups or scheduled replication.
IT teams often combine replication with regular backups to cover a wider range of recovery scenarios, including ransomware, accidental deletions, and compliance requirements. It also aligns with other common administrative tasks, such as backing up and restoring Proxmox VMs in mixed-hypervisor environments, and managing user data and recovery options through the Microsoft 365 admin center.
If you’re designing or refining a disaster recovery strategy, this post provides clear guidance on where real-time replication fits, its benefits and limitations, and how to choose the right approach for each workload.
👉 Read the complete guide on the NAKIVO blog to explore real-time data replication in detail and learn how to build a more resilient virtual infrastructure.
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