VM /ETC Go Green with Virtualization. Go UGLY Green with vmetc.com.

VMware announced officially today that Site Recovery Manager will be available for order next week and then generally available within 30 days. As I mentioned in my Site Recovery Manager Overview post last week, a requirement to using SRM will be a Site Recovery Agent (SRA) from the various storage vendors. VMware’s announcement reveals what vendors will provide SRAs initially:

“VMware Site Recovery Manager leverages customers’ investment in storage replication software from VMware’s leading storage partners including 3PAR, Dell, EMC, FalconStor, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM, LeftHand Networks and NetApp. VMware is working with partners across its storage partner ecosystem to ensure that customers can use Site Recovery Manager with their storage system and software platform of choice.”

As expected, several reports surfaced on the Internet today

• Continue reading or Leave a comment... (0)

One of the hands on labs I attended at VMware Partner Exchange was the Site Recovery Manager (SRM) lab. In the lab I was able to get a good understanding of the technical details of how the yet to be released product is configured. The lab then walked us through the fail over process and workflow. This post is a high level summary of what I learned. This post is not intended to be a detailed how to, but instead just a logical overview about what it will take to set up SRM.

• Continue reading or Leave a comment... (2)

When I was linking to RTFM Education from my post Combining multiple VMware .lic files is a thing of the past I noticed Mike wrote a quick post about discovering the new LAN based backup features of VCB. I had to get my own copy of the VMware Consolidated Backup Improvements in Version 3.5 .pdf and understand the new LAN-based backup feature. In short, the requirement for a storage area network, and therefore the installation of VCB on a physical server with HBA(s) has been removed. Installing VCB on a Windows 2003 virtual machine is now possible. Maybe not recommended for larger environments, but possible and a achievable design for smaller infrastructures.

The .pdf also reveals that there are several other new features of VCB that were previously restrictions of the older versions.

• Continue reading or Leave a comment... (2)

Compared to VMware ESX Enterprise Edition, business continuity and high availability features are lacking when deploying Citrix XenServer “out of the box.” Specifically, XenServer does not have the built in equivalent to VI3’s HA feature. Also missing is a solution similar to VMware’s soon to be released Site Recovery Manager (SRM). However, Marathon Technologies and XenSource (now a division of Citrix) have worked together to develop everRun VM as a enterprise class answer to fault tolerant availability for Windows virtual machines hosted on Citrix XenServer. According to Marathon’s Director of Products, Michael Bilancieri, at a recent Atlanta “Virtualization for the Real World” event, the integrated solution will be generally available sometime in the 2008 Q2/Q3 time frame.

Quoting from the Best of VMworld (more on this award later in this post) white paper downloadable from the everRun link above:

• Continue reading or Leave a comment... (1)

One of the advantages of a virtual infrastructure is the ability to cost effectively replicate your production systems to a secondary disaster recovery environment. Not only can you do this with virtual machines, but there are now several options available to allow physical servers to be replicated to a stand-by VM. This post will briefly cover several products and solutions and provide multiple commercial options and a free alternative.

• Continue reading or Leave a comment... (1)

One of the engineers from our storage team asked me to join a discussion about whether or not restoring VMs from images made by any of the live VM backup utilities would be a reliable process for a client. I unknowingly joined what was really a battle about whether the client would be better off using SAN based snapshots, host based replication, or live VM imaging specifically for Exchange and SQL VMs. All are proven solutions, and depending on budget, recovery objectives, and service level agreements all solutions could be deployed with confidence. The customer, and this post, is focused on the live VM backup solutions and their reliability for Exchange and SQL. Based on cost of implementation and infrastructure required the VM backup tools are the most affordable and easiest to deploy, but they also leave you with the most uncertainty.

Before continuing I want to point out that normal backup agents still need to be used for Exchange and SQL VMs. Not one of the VM backup solutions can perform application maintenance or specialized backups, like the Exchange Information Store backup for example. Understand that the live VM backup tools only specialize in capturing a quiescent, working image of the VM operating system and application.

First let’s understand what we mean when we say quiescent data. In the latest VMware Virtual Machine Backup Guide quiescing is defined as:

• Continue reading or Leave a comment... (0)

I ran into a frustrating issue this week where VCB was backing up everything except the .vmdk files. The vcbMounter.exe command would run and finish without errors, but when I checked the backed up files in the VCB Proxy’s “holding tank” LUN everything was there but the virtual disks. I was troubleshooting with a 20 GB Server 2003 VM and the command finished in about 30 seconds. During the troubleshooting I watched Virtual Center announce it was creating the snapshot and then immediately delete the snapshot. It did not error. There were no clues in any of the logs. It wasn’t until the -L 6 option (verbose) was added to the vcbMounter command that I was able to see the problem.

It turns out that the VM’s virtual disks were Independent. The VM was originally created on a ESX 2.X host a couple of years ago. I had helped the customer migrate to VI3 last year. Apparently the migrated and upgraded virtual hardware maintained the older disk settings. Once we powered down the VM and unchecked the Independent feature VCB backed up the .vmdk files. Unfortunately there are more than 50 VMs this customer will have to schedule shutdowns for in order to uncheck the Independent disk setting.

Independent virtual disks do not allow snapshots. Snapshots are required in order to use VCB. VCB works by creating a snapshot, which freezes the VM temporarily and then sends future disk activity to a “disk buffer”. The original .vmdks are then static and can be copied to the “holding tank”. Once VCB has finished copying the .vmdks the “disk buffer” is committed to the original disk and then the VM is “thawed” backed to normal. VMs created on ESX 3.x hosts do not have the Independent disk option enabled by default.

• Leave a comment... (3)

When you use VCB you have to specify either ESX root or VC2 administrator credentials. These credentials are added and easily found stored in the required vcb-pre-backup and vcb-post-backup .bat files, and the config.js file when using a third party backup integration module. Therefore, a best practice is to create a new user that has the required permissions for backing up VMs. The new user, vcbuser, will allow you to keep your administrator and root accounts secure.

In the latest version of VC, VC2.5, the vcbuser role and permissions are predefined and called “VMware Consolidated Backup User”. The steps in this post are intended only for VC2.02 and earlier.

To create the vcbuser do the following:

• Continue reading or Leave a comment... (0)

Looking for a comparison of VM backup solutions? PHD Technologies, makers of esXpress, have put together a matrix of features comparing how their product stacks up to VMware’s VCB, Vizioncore’s vRanger, and even vRanger integrated with VCB.

Check it out online in original form here.

I have saved the matrix as a stand alone page as well.

updated 12-11-07 *****

After reading comments from readers I realized

• Continue reading or Leave a comment... (9)

Live Demonstration of VCB and Netbackup

The link above is a recorded demo of using VCB integrated with Netbackup. It’s a great 15 minute recording that demonstrates how to run full VM backups and file level restores using the familiar Netbackup interface.

The demo also covers how to set up a special Virtual Center user and role in order to avoid compromising the password of an administrator account in the vcb configuration file. The presenter also covers the use of a network share to get the restored files to the original source VM.

If a picture is worth a thousand words then at 25 frames per second …. well, you do the math!

• Leave a comment... (0)

It’s always an afterthought. The client bought VI3 Enterprise so they know they have VCB. Everybody is talking about live VM backups so what’s the big deal? Sounds like it’s simple to start backing up VMs and maybe even reducing the cost of your backup agent licensing, right? Well, if you haven’t planned for it, then not really.

It’s not that it’s difficult to install VCB. It’s understanding what is needed to use it. I’ve heard VMware themselves say it’s not the whole solution. It’s just a framework of scripts to help integrate the enterprise backup solution with the virtual environment. Here’s how VMware’s Virtual Machine Backup Guide puts it:

Consolidated Backup consists of a set of utilities and scripts that work in conjunction with a third party backup software. To ensure that Consolidated Backup works with specific backup software, either VMware or your backup software vendor provide integration modules containing any required pre backup and post backup scripts. The third party software, integration module, and Consolidated Backup run on the VCB proxy, a physical machine that has Microsoft Windows 2003 installed.

Here’s what you need to configure before you install VCB.

• Continue reading or Leave a comment... (1)

Too many companies try to implement replication to a DR VI without upgrading the bandwidth between the primary and secondary sites. Let’s look at a simple example that can illustrate what could go wrong with inadequate bandwidth.

A company has 5 VMs that each use 20 GB virtual disks. The data is not too dynamic and data change only averages about 1o% per business day or roughly 1 GB per hr. This data change could be common activity like Active Directory replication, files saved to user home folders, application databases, and email. This is common to a small to medium sized business.

Using the Data Replication Minimum Bandwidth Requirements chart provided by NSI, makers of Double-Take, You can see that the 100 GB falls into the LAN 10Mb/s bandwidth category (in the 10% column). Click the thumbnail image to the left for a better view of the chart. We’ve already proved that this company needs better than a T1, but it’s close enough not to convince those that think their data change will be lower than 10%.

The real “gotcha” is that companies never consider how long it will take to replicate the data.

• Continue reading or Leave a comment... (0)