Replicate your VMFS partitions - NetApp

Posted on September 13th, 2007 in SAN, netapp, replication, sol exchange, storage, vmworld by Rich

Another “ton of bricks” moment happened to me when I was talking about SAN replication with NetApp yesterday in the Solutions Exchange. Using your WAN, NetApp’s products can replicate block level data between each other, or they can replicate the data from your existing SAN.

So, this means that I can buy a single NetApp product and put it at my DR site and start replicating my VI for fail-over. I don’t even need to worry about building the ESX infrastructure right away. Although, the ability to test my DR fail-over requires I have ESX servers at my secondary site.

I asked for general pricing for a small office SAN. I guestimated about 3TB of data would be needed. Although they wouldn’t give me a firm quote I was told pricing should be somewhere in the $10k - $15K range.


Platespin PowerRecon Virtual Infrastruture Edition

Posted on September 13th, 2007 in P2V, capacity analysis, feature comparison, platespin, powerrecon, services, sol exchange, vmworld by Rich

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

Live VM backups from a VM - esXpress VBA

Posted on September 12th, 2007 in appliance, dr, esxpress, sol exchange, vmworld by Rich

You don’t have the budget for the required infrastructure of VCB backups? Try esXpress from PHD technologies. I mean literally, try their free 30 day, fully functioning, fully supported demo that can back up live VMs to a dedicated VMFS partition, an FTP server, or both! After the 30 days you can continue to perform daily full backups for FREE!

Once you install it on all your ESX hosts, you can configure the backups from a basic console GUI or integrated within the VI client connected to the VC2 server.

Vizioncore’s new products and releases

Posted on September 12th, 2007 in sol exchange, virtual iron, vizioncore, vmworld by Rich

Quest is the parent company of Vizioncore. Look for some new VI monitoring tools from these guys soon, but for now check out:

vRanger (formerly ESXRanger) - is still the best VCB based solution for live VM backups IMHO. I am not sure of the general availability date, but the product will soon use MS VSS as well.

vReplicator (formerly ESXReplicator) - Service console based VM replication. The only solution that I know of at this time that goes the extra step and registers the replicated VM in the VI at the DR site.

vCharter - monitoring, drill down performance analytics, and charge back reporting tool

vMigrator -

“vMigrator provides a powerful tool that can support the upgrade process from ESX Server to VI3, by enabling smooth and seamless migrations to the new platform with minimal downtime even for complex environments.”

vOptimizer -

“vOptimizer is an advanced optimization solution that quickly and easily reduces a virtual machine’s virtual hard drive to the smallest size possible while optimizing Windows guest operating systems for speed and performance. “

vConverter - similar to VMware’s VMConverter in design but can also V2V

“vConverter enables fast and easy conversions without disrupting the source physical system during the conversion process. There are never any reboots, no need to visit machines being converted, no software to install on the source and no downtime. vConverter contains advanced disk and network I/O algorithms to ensure that the fastest possible conversions are executed, and extremely reliable block level cloning is performed to minimize any risk of data loss. “

vPackager - sounds like this product will give some competition to VMware’s LabManager

“With vPackager, customers can configure a Windows based VM with the applications and configurations they wish to distribute, then extract these changes to a compressed package. This package can be distributed without OS licensing implications and applied to similar VMs to merge the changes.”

LeftHand Networks VSA

Posted on September 12th, 2007 in SAN, appliance, iSCSI, lefthand, sol exchange, vmworld, vsa by Rich

Virtual SAN Appliance for VMware ESX

I’ve been hearing about it all week. The President of my company sent me an email about this at the start of the conference. I finally got to talk to the LeftHand team at their booth today about their new virtual appliance - VSA.

You can download a trial version of VSA here.

Some notes about implementing VSA:

  1. you must reserve 1 GB ram for VSA on each ESX host
  2. you must reserve 2 GHz cpu for VSA on each ESX host
  3. you must create a dedicated Gigabit virtual switch for VSA on each ESX host

After you configure the VSA VMs on each of your local ESX VMFS they are clustered and data is “striped” between all hosts. Then if one host goes down the data is still available to the VMs as they are VMotion-ed or restarted via HA on the other hosts.

The VSA has native ability to do SAN based replication via the WAN.

Veeam tools

Posted on September 11th, 2007 in sol exchange, vmworld by Rich

I first heard about Veeam a few months back when I was looking for tool to configure multiple ESX servers.

  • Veeam Configurator
  • FastSCP (free)
  • Veeam RootAccess (free)

They have a cool reporting tool as well - great for ESX health check projects or documenting an implementation

  • Veeam Reporter

Virtualoctane

Posted on September 11th, 2007 in esx, sol exchange, vmware, vmworld by Rich

Virtualoctane for ESX

  • Increase VMs per server
  • boost performance
  • improve heavy i/o workloads
  • increase resource utilization

I talked to InovaWave at their booth in the Solutions Exchange. Interesting product. They claim they can provide acceptable performance for larger deployments of Exchange and SQL as VMs. I asked if an agent was installed on each ESX host and was told it was a “driver”. You then configure this driver to optimize specific VMs. So, I wondered “what about DRS?” and I was told that Virtualoctane allows you to scale back DRS because resource contention is minimized. “How about HA?” was my next thought - once the VM restarts on the next ESX host the local driver picks it up there.

MS Server 2008 and VMM

Posted on September 11th, 2007 in MS VMM, conf info, sol exchange, vmworld by Rich

Microsoft:

Server 2008 looks promising for virtualization. Comes in a command line only desktop ideal for VI - can be managed remotely via Virtual Machine Manager

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 is the MS version of Vc2 and more:

  • Can consolidate physical servers to VMs (P2V) and import other VMs (V2V)
    • uses VSS to create new VM without interrupting source server - nice! ( I have done this on occasion manually)
    • can convert VMware VMs
  • Intelligent workload placement
    • MS calls feature “Intelligent Placement” - imagine that!
    • analyzes both VM and host workload along with business rules to determine placement
  • Rapid deployment and migration of VMs
    • can deploy and manage multiple VMs across multiple hosts
  • Central library
    • vm disks
    • iso files
    • templates
  • Reports and performance monitoring
    • use SQL server and SQL Reporting Services