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.
If you are in a hurry and want to quickly get a “guesstimate” of power and cooling savings from server consolidation check out an online calculator from Platespin. The PowerRecon Power and Cooling Savings Calculator is pre-populated with commonly accepted industry values and essentially makes it very easy for you to enter the number of physical servers to match your datacenter and then hit the “calculate” button. Not only does it give you savings figures, but it provides some basic virtual host consolidation ratios for you too.
Platespin is using some big assumptions in these calculations. From the calculator’s page:
Packages including server hardware, Virtual Iron 4.0 and implementation services are now being offered from IBM and HP. Virtual Iron has also signed a reseller agreement with Dell. The combination of these new partnerships is positioning the VMware alternative as a highly visible choice for SMBs looking to migrate to a virtual datacenter.
An article from SearchServerVirtualization.com, Virtual Iron, IBM, HP package virtualization on blades for SMBs, reports on Virtual Iron’s new SMB strategy:
I received an email announcing a new release of PowerRecon from Platespin. It sounds like features have been added to the product to take it from being a capacity analysis tool to a VI monitoring and reporting tool. I will have to stop by their booth and get the scoop.
From the email:
PlateSpin is announcing the general availability of PowerRecon 3.1., and the new Virtual Infrastructure Edition.
Highlights of this release:
VIE features:- Integration with VMware Virtual Center
- Discovery and inventory of the complete physical and virtual infrastructure
- Power and Cooling Reporting
- Virtual Infrastructure Chargeback Reporting
- Virtual Machine Sprawl Reporting
- Priced per CPU
Other noteworthy feature enhancements:- Group and matrix reporting capabilities
- Scalability enhancements
- Tighter integration with the virtual infrastructure layer
- Extended platform support
A common issue error encountered after the P2V migration of a windows server is:
The IP address XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX you have entered for this network adapter is already assigned to another adapter Name of adapter. Name of adapter is hidden from the network and Dial-up Connections folder because it is not physically in the computer or is a legacy adapter that is not working. If the same address is assigned to both adapters and they become active, only one of them will use this address. This may result in incorrect system configuration. Do you want to enter a different IP address for this adapter in the list of IP addresses in the advanced dialog box?
Microsoft KB Article 269155 provides the explanation and the work arounds methods for this issue.
From the KB Article, here is an explanation of the cause of the issue and the most common resolution method.
