VM /ETC

Archive for the ‘fail over’ Category

Because of the prevalence of virtual infrastructure these days, I’ll make the argument that virtual machine (VM) replication, both for business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) purposes, is the new P2V (physical to virtual migration) project. Not in the literal migration of physical to virtual, but in the same P2V concepts of infrastructure consolidation and capacity planning. I’m also talking similarity of process and in the frequency in which it is occurring. Simply put, IT shops that performed P2V migrations several years ago are now exploring how they can accomplish their DR site fail over or their BC needs with their virtual machines.

Let’s call these new generation of projects V4DR (virtualization for disaster recovery) or V4BC (virtualization for business continuity).

The comparison

If I rewind 3 to 5 years ago in my career, capacity planning for server consolidation was a weekly project and topic of discussion. Customers were either in the process of converting physical servers to virtual machines or they were exploring the possibility to do so. In both cases, capacity planning scenario spreadsheets and reports were frequent “ground zero documents” to almost every project plan I was involved in.

Just like P2V projects, VM replication today also requires some of the same considerations for job scalability and times to complete – i.e. using multiple hosts as targets and making sure the network can support getting the job done as quick as possible. Not to mention ip addressing, VLAN assignments, and application connectivity after the fact. Thank goodness we no longer have to deal with hardware drivers and other unneeded software a second time. Hopefully, VM alignment is a thing of the past too!

I’m not seeing the same “ground zero documents” for replication projects, however.

Use the same capacity planning tools?

So, I’ll ask the question:  Read the rest of this entry »

If you are looking at various options to automate virtual machine (VM) ip address reconfiguration when failing over virtual machines to a disaster recovery (DR) site, this post explains an option so simple it is beautiful. To give full credit, the Vizioncore vReplicator 2.5 Best Practices document enlightened me to the strategy of using a local only VMware vSwitch and an extra virtual NIC (vNIC) in each VM. It’s been a long time since I had a “ton of bricks” moment, but this concept crashed down on me with the realization of a configuration that works in any version of ESX, doesn’t require extra software or hardware, and better yet, doesn’t have to be scripted! Just configure some extra virtual networking and forget about it!

Here is a general outline for automating the DR ip addressing with this method:

At the Primary Site

• For these instructions assume the production vSwitch at the primary site has a Portgroup named VM Network
• Build a new vSwitch and do not attach any physical NICs (local only isolated switch). Create a Portgroup named DR Network
• For each VM you need to fail over to a DR site, add an extra vNIC and attach it to the DR Network Portgroup

At the DR Site

• Create your DR site production vSwitch, attach physical NICs and add a Portgroup named DR Network.
• Create another vSwitch and do not attach any physical NICs (local only isolated switch). Create a Portgroup named VM Network

All you have to do for this to work is

Read the rest of this entry »

VMware has announced an upgrade release of Site Recovery Manager (SRM).  Available today, SRM version 4 not only adds the much anticipated compatibility for vSphere 4 but also provides support for NFS storage, allows multi instance replication between single site pairs, and can be managed in vCenter Linked Mode. More details on the new version follow in the paragraphs below.

VMware customers who currently own SRM with active Sales and Support (SnS) contracts will receive the upgrade at no additional cost. VMware has not changed the per processor licensing model or cost for new customers wishing to purchase.

Some quick links for SRM 4:

• SRM 4. Release notes – http://www.vmware.com/support/srm/srm_releasenotes_4_0.html
• Upgrade KB article – http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1013166
• SRM download – http://downloads.vmware.com/d/ and select Site Recovery Manger
• Michael White’s post SRM 4.0 is here! The wait for vSphere and NFS support is over! on the VMware Uptime Blog covers upgrade strategy options.
• VMware’s documentation for all version of SRM – http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/srm_pubs.html

vSphere 4.0 Supported

The main requirement to enable the new compatibility and features in SRM is upgrading vCenter to version 4. In fact, Read the rest of this entry »

Now that I’ve sat the VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) class, done the labs, and had some design and implementation time with the product I am reminded of a scene from the movie The Wizard of Oz. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” is a famous line from the movie which comes from the scene when Dorothy and gang discover that the mighty and powerful Wizard they fear is really just an elaborate machine controlled by an ordinary man.

I am not suggesting that SRM is a sham. In fact, it provides automation of virtual infrastructure fail over between sites that is truly wizard-like. Understand however, VMware SRM software is just the last piece of the total data center recovery “machine”. Many organizations may be seeking the semblance of automated site fail over, but have they really considered in detail what it takes to start up their business critical systems at a secondary location?

A simple determination of readiness for SRM’s wizardry is answering this question: Read the rest of this entry »

I attended this VMworld 2008 session on Wednesday 09.18 at 9:00 AM. The presenter was Sunder Parameswaran who is a Senior Product Manager at Symantec. The session was about using Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) in VMware virtual infrastructure (VI) to overcome application high availability and disaster recovery (DR) challenges.

My main interest in this session was on the topic of Geo Clustering with VCS. Also known as Metro Clustering, this is the ability to have one node of the cluster at your primary data center location and the second node at a separate physical location like a disaster recovery site.

Sunder began by outlining various VI challenges.

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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.
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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:

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