Avoid Hot VMware Snapshots When Using Storage Array Snapshots

Posted on June 7th, 2008 in SAN, esx, microsoft, netapp, replication, srm, storage by Rich

Avoiding storage array snapshot pitfalls in a VMware environment is an article and tip published by Scott Lowe for Searchvmware.com. Scott discusses the design challenges and implications of combining the snapshot abilities of VMware ESX with the SAN based snapshot features of storage devices. The tip points out that incorrect configuration of VMware ESX with the storage device could lead to inconsistent and unusable images when trying to recover VMs.

“Because these snapshots are not, by default, integrated in any way with VMware ESX Server, we have to perform a few extra steps to ensure consistently reliable and usable storage array snapshots.”

Read all of Scott’s tip at the link to the article above.

My “2 cents” on this is that trying to configure the combination of the two snapshots manually might not

VMware Site Recovery Manager Overview

Posted on May 8th, 2008 in dr, fail over, srm by Rich

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.

VI3.5 New Feature Summary

Posted on November 17th, 2007 in esx, esx 3i, esx3.5, srm, stor vmotion, vc2, vc2.5, vcb, vdm, vmware by Rich

VI3.5 what's new summary

VMware VI3.5 is scheduled to be generally available by the end of 2007. Based on a public .pdf released by VMware, this post is my summary of the new features. I’m guessing this .pdf is really a .ppt presentation that VMware is delivering, but I have not attended this presentation myself.

The screen shot is from the document and shows the new features in the defined layers.

After some sales and marketing slides the document classifies the VI3 features today across 3 layers. These layers are then used to group the new features for the rest of the presentation.

The features are divided into 3 layers:

New Trends for Disaster recovery - BC31

Posted on September 11th, 2007 in breakout, dr, srm, vmware, vmworld by Rich

Storage VMotion - move VM disks without downtime!

Site Recovery Manager

DR Pain points

  • lack of reliable plan
  • can’t meet RTO or RPO reqs
  • expenses for hardware at DR site

VI3 improves DR

  • RTO / Cost / Reliability
  • Failover / Planning / testing
    • isolate network for live testing
  • Hdw independence / encapsulation / boot from san / drs and resource pools / snap shots & vlans
  • instant repurposing