Planet vSphere-land

Are you a marketing or public relations, press or analyst relations or social media expert and your email messages, notes, updates or requests get overlooked? Are you in the first paragraph or couple of sentences indicating who you are representing, what the info or request is about as well as what call to action you are looking for? If you are doing what is done in many of the requests for c...

From the Zerto site: Zerto provides enterprise-class business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solutions for virtualized infrastructure and cloud. Zerto won Best of Show at VMworld 2011, as well as 2011 Product of the Year Gold Award because our software, Zerto Virtual Replication, is the industry’s first hypervisor-based replication solution for tier-one applications. Zerto Disaster [....

Howard Marks has a great piece on VMware buying Virsto over at Network Computing (link is below): Some of my fellow analysts have lumped Virsto into the flash acceleration category along with caching solutions like Proximal Data, Sandisk’s Flashsoft and Intel’s CAS. While Virsto can use flash to accelerate some storage I/O, it’s not primarily a flash acceleration product. I...

Someone asked this question last week when I posted my “back to basics” vSphere Replication blog. I guess protecting vCenter Server isn’t too difficult but how about recovering it after a failure? Those who have used vSphere Replication know that you need vCenter Server to click “Recover”. In a dual vCenter Server configuration that is not a problem. But what if you...

Although application consistency is more often discussed in the context of virtual machine (VM) backups, it’s just as important to consider a strategy for fail over replicas. In fact, if you are both backing up and replicating the same VM(s) it becomes even more critical. With Veeam, the configuration for application consistency (and the GUI windows for doing so) are the same for replicati...

As I have done since version 3.5, I’m charting the storage changes in VMware’s latest release of vSphere, 5.1. Detailed at VMworld but not released as of this writing, vSphere 5.1 is lauded for eliminating the “vTax” and bringing features like replication, a revised backup application, and shared-nothing vMotion. Unlike version 5, which included many new technical storage...

Tucked in the back pocket with all the other big announcements today at VMworld is the availability of vSphere Replication as a standalone option. It is no longer tied to SRM 5.0 as it was originally made available. This is probably to line up with the FUD that Microsoft has been pushing with their Hyper-V replica being free. What this means is that small shops will have a way to protect their v...

If you've got the time to do a readiness assessment or a environemnt health check then great, but, more times than not, a company needs to get the DR solution up and running and figure out the weakest links in the chain along the way. This post offers some suggestions for standing up hypervisor based replication jobs and then adjusting them as you go. This post is part of the VMETC.com From ...

This is the start of a “from the field” (FTF) series of blog posts based on the common considerations and scenarios I’ve run into while helping customers and partners designing, implementing, and evaluating host based replication for disaster recovery and business continuity. Veeam v6 is an awesome and cost effective solution that many companies have implemented, but there are ...

Spring (May) 2012 News letter Welcome to the Spring (May) 2012 edition of the Server and StorageIO Group (StorageIO) news letter. This follows the Fall (December) 2011 edition. You can get access to this news letter via various social media venues (some are shown below) in addition to StorageIO web sites and subscriptions. Click on the following links to view the Spring May 2012 edition...

Last month PHD Virtual released version 5.3 of their Backup and Replication and PHD Virtual has really stepped up their game with this new release. There are a handful of new features and improvements but the biggest improvement is the enhanced scalability and performance. The performance for virtual machine backup and restore operations has improved significantly [...] by Erik Scholten

Recently a disgruntled vSphere administrator was able to delete 88 of his former employer’s virtual machines (VMs) remotely from a McDonald’s WiFi connection. We all know virtualization makes things a lot easier, and unfortunately, this is a scary example of the dark side of just that. I’ll argue it’s also a wake up call for IT departments to realize how virtualizatio...

Zerto http://www.Zerto.com/ (Zero RTO) is a startup company that I first heard about when they were presenting at the Techfield Day in Boston. All information was under embargo, which didn’t allow us delegates to publish about Zerto until June 22nd and so I had to wait with this post until now. The presentation done by Chen Burshan – Director Product Management and Gil Levonai – VP Product...

Because of the prevalence of virtual infrastructure these days, I’ll make the argument that virtual machine (VM) replication, both for business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) purposes, is the new P2V (physical to virtual migration) project. Not in the literal migration of physical to virtual, but in the same P2V concepts of infrastructure consolidation and capacity planning. ...

Just received notice this morning that EMC VNX Replicator has been approved for support for VMware Site Recovery Manager 4.0.x and 4.1.x. An excerpt of the message is below: The EMC VNX Replicator 4.0.23 is now certified (re-test waiver) for SRM versions 4.0.x and 4.1.x. EMC has updated the 4.0.22 Celerra SRA to reflect new array support (VNX line), but have not had to change any of the code as ...

A colleague of mine recently reported an alarming event witnessed at a customer of both EMC and VMware. After enabling Storage IO Control (SIOC), vCenter reported a possible problem with a datastore. The specific text of the event is: External I/O workload detected on shared datastore running Storage I/O (SIOC) for congestion management Googling this text will bring you to a VMware KB article ...

It came to my attention pretty quick that something was amiss with the last Celerra VSA UBER release. I heard strange stories of disks not adding and the OVA not deploying. Since this thing is drawing close on a couple thousand downloads some environmental, transfer, and operational bugs/errors will cause problems. But I finally nailed this down myself when I was doing my iSCSI testing. I had ru...

Figuring out whether you can replicate your VMs across your WAN to a DR site is never easy. There are many factors to consider, but luckily, one of my Veeam peers and a fellow VMware vExpert, Ricky El -Qasem has created a Replication Calculator to help figure it out. From the post on the Virtualize Planet Blog: Replication Bandwidth Calculator | Virtualize Planet ReplicaCalc How many times do...

So transparency is a good thing right? Especially since I just found out I have a ‘vendor’ blog *eek* I will make this short and sweet. I have been working on a home lab SRM thingy for a couple weeks. I had completed all my testing with NFS replication and plug-ins. Pretty darn sweet stuff but that is another post coming. When I moved on to the the iSCSI testing everything was kosher until...

What happens to a VM that is hosted on a VMFS datastore when you physically remove both of the mirrored drives from the array? Kernel panic/blue screen right? What if you were replicating that LUN to another site using array based replication? Would the VM still crash? Not if you’re using Symmetrix Remote Data Facility, Synchronous mode (SRDF-S). Let’s rewind a bit. One of the main archi...

For an upcoming project I was preparing to P2V a domain controller and found a lot of “info” on this subject which got me thinking. Everybody is talking about all the dangers related to P2V-ing a... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]