Vizioncore

Replication of Virtual Machines to a Hot Site

So you finally have your VMware environment all set up and everything is running great. Everyone is on board with virtualization and you were able to consolidate your data center down to one server room with one rack. Now all of a sudden you’re tasked with the duties of replication to another site.

What can you do in this situation? There are many cool products out there at your disposable.  One of these products is called vReplicator. It is made by Vizioncore, the creators of vRanger which is used for backing up virtual machines.

vReplicator will take your virtual machine and replicate it across the WAN to another site. Then when there is a failover you can start up the virtual machine in this other site if the other site has completely failed. Or if the main site is still up  you can facilitate a failover through the vReplicator software itself. Either way, it works great! You can read more about it here.

VMware Update 3 is out! Vizioncore will be releasing VRanger support for ESXi 3.5 soon!

Hi folks, VMware Update 3 is now out and it addresses quite a few outstanding issues. You can read about the resolved issues in the release notes here. With VMware Update 3 out now once again you should pay heed to proper patch procedures as I always recommend. Please apply the patch in a test lab environment and watch how it affects things.

After you have spent the time patching and testing in the lab you will eventually have an opportunity to deploy this to your production environment. Don’t deploy it to every single server, just deploy it to one ESX host, see how thtat goes and then start to deploying it to other ESX hosts. This way you have something to fail back to if something goes wrong. You can download the update here.

In other news, Vizioncore will be releasing a version of VRanger that supports backing up of virtual machines in ESXi 3.5 in the first quarter of 2009! This  is great news as currently there isn’t an easy way to do this. Right now the easiest way to back up an entire virtual machine while it’s running live is to be running the paid for versions of VMware as opposed to the free ESXi 3.5. With the release of VRanger for ESXi 3.5 next year this is going to make ESXi 3.5 an even more appealing solution to the budget concious IT administrator looking to dip their toe into the waters of virtualization.

-RP

VMWare Virtual Machine Backups

I am often asked, what do we do for backups in a virtual environment? One of my favourite methods is to use a product called vRanger Pro from Vizioncore.

 Vizioncore makes a great product called vEssentials which consists of vRanger Pro, vReplicator, and vCharter Pro. The Vizioncore offering is a lot cheaper than some of the competitor offerings.

 vRanger Pro backs up the entire VM allowing you to restore it if something happens to it. vReplicator replicates the entire VM to another site for a great disaster recovery alternative and vCharter Pro provides a great solution for performance monitoring.

 You can check out their products here. Despite using these products for virtual machine backups, I would still use a normal backup product to backup the individual data inside the virtual machine so you can do granualar restoration. Virtual machine backups are more for the situation where you lose the entire VM not for when you just need to restore an individual file.

 -RP