VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘vizioncore’

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 »

At the VMworld 2009 Vizioncore booth I discovered 3 new free tools from Vizioncore that all VI administrators, no matter which popular hypervisor platform you use, should know about. vConverter SC, vControl Multi-Hypervisor Management, and vOptimizer WasteFinder offer unique features that accomplish and automate common virtual environment administrative tasks. These products include tools for P2V and V2V migrations between multiple vendor platforms, a web based multi hypervisor management server, and virtual disk optimization through VMDK alignment and wasted storage scanning.

Vizioncore is banking on creating wider interest and adoption of its full product suite in the virtualization market, but for now administrators definitely come out the winners with these great tools at no cost. The free products mentioned in this post (as well as all of Vizioncore’s software) can be downloaded here.

I’ve summarized these utilities in the rest of this post. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s inevitable. If you are a virtual infrastructure administrator, architect, or blogger you will eventually talk about VMware VMFS and virtual disk alignment. I’m not going to try to explain the concepts in this post. My goal is to discuss whether to align VMware virtual disks (VMDKs) and what options are available for performing the alignment.

Bottom line is that if you are deploying new VMs from a template you should do so from an aligned master, but VMs created from physical to virtual migrations (P2Vs) present some practical challenges and don’t have to be treated as urgently.

Recommendations

First things first. My interpretation of VMware’s stance on alignment is that they do not advocate aligning every P2V-ed VM to the VMFS due to the administrative effort, disk space requirements, potential VM down time, and in most cases a nominal VM performance increase. On the other hand, it is crystal clear that VMware does recommend always formatting VMFS LUNs with the VI Client and always taking the time to align Gold Image templates so new servers deployed will automatically be aligned.

For reference here’s VMware’s PDF on the topic:

I’ll admit my perspective as a consultant may be a bit different than the normal VI admin. After all, I am mostly involved in the Read the rest of this entry »

Vizioncore, makers of virtualization products such as vRanger, vReplicator, vConverter, vOptimizer, and vCharter Pro, has made available free online training materials for all of it’s products. Via the vZone page on the Vizioncore website, any one has access to professional training course notes, lab excercises, and multimedia presentation recordings.

The Vizioncore vZone training content I have seen so far is on par with any multi day course I have taken in the past (for any company’s product training), and the lab manuals have been extremely valuable as a walk through set up and configuration guide. The content can even serve as a means of evaluating Vizioncore’s excellent offerings (updated 04.24.07 most products have a free trial)  to compliment and enhance you virtual infrastructure administration.

Take advantage of these free training resources at Vizioncore vZone – Training.

A critical piece of the migration to virtual infrastructure is the consideration of how to backup the new virtual machines and the data they contain. Although switching to a full VM backup strategy is desirable, the reality of the required tape or disk media needed to support the large backup file sizes causes companies to continue to use the existing physical environment’s agent based backup.

However, Vizioncore and Datadomain offer a feasible backup solution using commonly available IP based storage that should make IT departments with even the tightest budgets look twice. Combining deduplication with LAN based VM backups to CIFS shares or NFS mounts, this solution provides a cost effective transition to full VM backups with minimal storage space consumed. Datadomain and Vizioncore established a certified partnership for VMware infrastructure in September of 2007 and therefore provide established solutions with technologies proven to work well together.

The image to the right was taken from Vizioncore’s solution .pdf titled Cost Efective Backup & Recovery & Storage for Virtualized Environments with Vizioncore Solutions and Data Domain Deduplication Appliances. The .pdf provides an overview of the design as well as recommendations for ensuring performance. This diagram illustrates a solution for not only VMs but also physical servers backed up as VMs by vRanger Pro’s P2V-DR feature.

To provide more specifics about this solution’s possibilities Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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 Read the rest of this entry »