The factors that influence the design of the backup and recovery of a virtual data center are the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). The RPO defines the amount of data loss that is acceptable. The RTO is the amount of time it should take to restore an application or service a workload after an outage.
The acceptable RPO and RTO should be defined for each workload. It is important to consider the application's dependencies when determining the RPO and RTO. Specifically, the RTO of an application will depend on the RTO of all of the application's dependencies. For example, if an application depends on a database server and the RTO of the database server is determined to be two hours, the RTO of the application itself cannot be less than two hours if the outage affects both the server running the application...
