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.
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:
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
Vizioncore’s vConverter 3 claims to be faster than both Platespin’s PowerConvert and VMware’s VMConverter.
“vConverter enables lightning 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. A significant R&D effort and focus on conversion reliability and efficiency has resulted in the fine tuning of read/write/transfer algorithms and the creation of several mechanisms which result in impressive speed and conversion completion metric.”
Click here to see demos of recorded conversions. The first example is a freshly installed
I recently installed the latest version of Vizioncore’s vRangerPro and ran into an issue where 2 of the VMs would not complete a backup. All of the other VMs would complete without issue. Both backup jobs would stall at the “Acquiring VM Lock. This may take many minutes!” message in the job console window. I had to manually cancel the first stalled job (using CTRL + C) before the second job would begin and eventually stall in the same spot.
I was using vRanger installed with VCB 1.0.3 on the same server. The backup was going to a local NTFS drive. The job was configured with VCB integration.
I was able to get the jobs to work by
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.
Vizioncore: vRanger Pro P2V-DR Module
Vizioncore’s new P2V-DR module adds the ability to create backups of running physical servers on centralized Windows storage.
“The P2V-DR Module in vRanger Pro leverages the robust conversion engine of Vizioncore’s vConverter software. The cloning method employed by vConverter is executed at the “block-level” as opposed to “file-level” which results in extremely fast & reliable conversions with superior completion rates and no data loss.”
Unlike Ghost or other products that allow you capture an image of a server for bare metal restores, Vizioncore’s new module captures the server image while the server is live, and those images are converted for restoring the image to a VM. This sounds similiar to Platespin’s P2I (physical to image) conversions.
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 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 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.”
From Vizioncore’s web page (linked below):
“vConverter is an enterprise-class conversion solution that significantly reduces the time and effort spent converting servers to the VMware, Microsoft, XenServer or Virtual Iron platforms. vConverter enables lightning 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. A significant R&D effort and focus on conversion reliability and efficiency has resulted in the fine tuning of read/write/transfer algorithms and the creation of several mechanisms which result in impressive speed and conversion completion metrics. Combined with an impressive simultaneous conversion capability, vConverter is ideal for medium to large server consolidation initiatives where hundreds or thousands of physical servers need to be virtualized. vConverter can migrate more servers per conversion window than any other conversion method or technology, dramatically reducing risk, cost and time from start to finish.”
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