london vmug july 2011

Leaders Have Vision™ visionsolutions.com 1

Meeting the Availability Challenges of physical, Virtual and Geographically dispersed Systems, with Vision Solutions


Vision Solutions’ Corporate Profile

• Leading portfolio of information availability brands– Supports Windows, Linux, Power Systems and Cloud Computing– Aligned with Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMware and other leaders

• One of the world’s largest engineering and support teams– Exclusive cross-pollination of ideas and technologies– The best talent in the industry!

• Among the industry’s largest worldwide partner networks– Unprecedented support for customers of all sizes and geos– 2000+ partners, 25,000+ customers in 70+ countries

• Strong financial performance

• Privately held by Thoma Bravo inpartnership with management


Meeting the Availability Challenge


Availability Challenges

• Downtime has a cost both to the business and to you

• How much does downtime cost you?

• Needs– Reduce downtime to a minimum

Downtime



• Data lost in outages adds to cost of downtime– Lost revenue and lost productivity to recreate data

• Needs– Failover to the latest valid version of data– Intelligently protect the data of critical business

applications

Data Loss



• Distance amplifies the challenges of Availability– Non-IT personnel responsible for backups– Less bandwidth available for network backups– Remote data is no less important; same compliance

requirements

• Needs– Protect data at remote offices– Protect data off-site for disaster recovery– Maximize use of existing bandwidth– Manage remote protection and DR centrally

Geographic Distance



• Roughly 50% of workloads are virtualised now– “Splitting” of the datacenter into two distinct

environments creates challenges– Management of two environments– Less flexibility with each

• Needs– Unify availability of both environments– Leverage virtualisation to improve availability of even

physical servers– Ease the migration to a fully virtual environment

Virtualization


Many Challenges – One Solution

VirtualizationDowntime Data Loss Geographic Distance

• Real-time Replication– Minimize data loss and downtime– Replicate over existing WAN bandwidth

• Virtualized Failover– Protect vSphere or Hyper-V environments with host-

level management and real-time replication– Failover P2V, V2P, P2P, or V2V

• Application Protection

• Cluster Integration– Replicate from clusters to standalone servers or

clusters– Create “Stretch Clusters” using the GeoCluster

feature

Replication Engine

Virtualised Failover

Application Protection

Cluster Integration



Replication One word

Few meanings

Many interpretations

What replication do you need?



Replication What replication do you need?

real-time

near-term

snapshot

Time

queue

application

system

transactional

folder

file

byte

block

synchronousasynchronous

local

off-site

storage

software

Near-continuous


Double-Take Availability Virtual recovery assistant

11

VRA lets you protect a source physical or virtual machine to a virtual target machine running on either Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V or VMware ESX Server.

Data is replicated directly into the virtual machine’s virtual disk, which means that the target virtual machine can remain powered off until failover. Automatic failover can be configured if the source/target connection is lost.

VRA provisions the target virtual machine for you. It can monitor the protected source machine. During protection setup, VRA lets you increase the drive size, memory, and number of processors on the target virtual machine



1. Console collects all job information.– Resident in memory of client until job starts.– Persisted by service in job file

2. Appliance creates virtual source as specified– disks for the virtual source can be located on different datastores– NIC mappings are critical and left to the user to configure on the ESX server

Source

C:\

ESX Server

Appliance

Datastore1

Datastore2

Virtual Source

Console

C:\

F:\

C:\

F:\

NIC1

NIC2

NIC1NIC2

VMDK 1

VMDK 2



3. Appliance attaches virtual source VMDK files to the DTVRA appliance4. Mounts the disks to a mount point5. Appliance formats the mounted drives as NTFS (unless pre-staged)6. Appliance creates job between source and appliance, creates failover script file,

connects/starts job, starts monitoring for failover.

Source

C:\

ESX Server

Appliance

Datastore1

Datastore2

Virtual Source

Console

C:\

F:\

C:\

F:\

NIC1

NIC2C:\.\MountDir\<GUID>_F\

C:\.\MountDir\<GUID>_C\

NIC1NIC2

VMDK 1

VMDK 2



Behind the Scenes: Failover

1. Failover command is sent by the Appliance

2. DT Job is deleted.3. Appliance uses DTCOM to

shutdown Source server4. Appliance deletes the DT

connect.sts file from virtual source

5. Appliance injects VM drivers into virtual source

6. Appliance processes the short file names

7. Mounted drives are dismounted8. Mounted ESX source VMDK files are

dismounted9. Virtual source is booted

Source

C:\

ESX Server

Appliance

Datastore1

Datastore2

Virtual Source

Console

C:\

F:\

C:\

F:\

NIC1

NIC2C:\.\MountDir\<GUID>_F\

C:\.\MountDir\<GUID>_C\

NIC1NIC2

VMDK 1

VMDK 2



• Console can use a Virtual Center or work directly with an ESX server

• Console collects all information about connection from user prior to executing anything.

• Able to change amount of RAM, number of processors, and disk sizes of virtual source

• ESX server configuration (network, stores, etc.) is left to the user.

• Once started, a DTVRA job is just like any Double-Take job.

• Any Double-Take client can control the job.

• Once source is failed-over, Double-Take has no further interaction with the new virtual server.


Meeting the Migration Challenge


Double-Take Move is …

Effortless no downtime server and data migrations.

Effortless no downtime X2X Windows server and data

migrations. Enables IT Managers and Administrators

to consolidate data centers across the WAN, virtualize their physical hardware (P2V), create

consistent virtual environments (V2V), refresh physical servers (P2P), all

while allowing users to remain productive and working during

the migration.

Effortless no downtime server and

data migrations.


Migration Challenges

• You need to keep your servers available to your end-users, with minimal downtime.

• Your environment uses physical and virtual servers, local and remote.

• You don’t want to buy special hardware.

• You want to use the network that is already in place.

• You want it to just work – “Setup the migration and forget it till time to cutover.”


Meeting the Migration Challenge

• Migrate applications and data with real-time replication while users are online and productive - reduce downtime to minutes instead of hours– Minimal downtime associated with migrations

• Real-Time Data Movement– LAN/WAN friendly– Local migrations or datacenter consolidations

• Migrate any combination of Physical or Virtual Servers (X2X)– Hardware independent

• P2V and V2V auto provisioning (Hyper-V/ESX)– Make virtualisation easy

• Entire server or just data migrations (SAN storage migrations)


Flexible Migrations

Any to Any

Migrations

Physical

Cloud

Virtual

Physical

Cloud

Virtual

• Support VMware and Hyper-V VM’s• Support any cloud environment, tested with Amazon and Skytap


Thank YouTel: + 44 (0) 333 1234 [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

london vmug july 2011

Technology

virtual sourceappliance

virtual center

virtual machines virtual

virtual target machine

eachneedsunify availability

availability challengesroughly

availability challengesdata

target virtual machine11