Chapter 1: An Introduction to VMware Virtualization
Chapter 2: Backup and Recovery Methodologies
Chapter 3: Data Recovery in Virtual Environments
Picture this: You round the corner and your CEO or another executive ambushes you with a question about an IT issue that’s keeping him up at night…
Business leaders and executives often need quick answers from IT, especially when there’s an issue underway and the ripple effects are beginning to spread. How you respond in these moments could make or break your career. (Here’s a hint: they won’t want technology-focused answers.)
This eBook will prepare you for those moments, showing you how to think about IT ‘as-a-Service’ and communicate in the language your leaders and executives understand, and the terms they care about.
You'll learn:
Massive changes are occurring to how applications are built and how they are deployed and run. The benefits of these changes are dramatically increased responsiveness to the business (business agility), increased operational flexibility, and reduced operating costs.
The environments onto which these applications are deployed are also undergoing a fundamental change. Virtualized environments offer increased operational agility which translates into a more responsive IT Operations organization. Cloud Computing offers applications owners a complete out-sourced alternative to internal data center execution environments. IT organizations are in turn responding to public cloud with IT as a Service (IaaS) initiatives.
For applications running in virtualized, distributed and shared environments, it will no longer work to infer the “performance” of an application by looking at various resource utilization statistics. Rather it will become essential to define application performance as response time – and to directly measure the response time and throughput of every application in production. This paper makes the case for how application performance management for virtualized and cloud based environments needs to be modernized to suit these new environments.
In large IT organizations, monitoring tool sprawl has become so commonplace that it is not unusual for administrators to be monitoring 10 to 50 solutions across various departments.
Unified monitoring solutions like Zenoss offer a cost-effective alternative for those seeking to rein-in monitoring inefficiencies. By establishing a central nerve center to collect data from multiple tools and managed resources, IT groups can gain visibility into the end-to-end availability and performance of their infrastructure. This helps simplify operational processes and reduce the risk of service disruption for the enterprise.
This paper can help you make an effective business case for moving to a unified monitoring solution. Key considerations include:
• The direct costs associated with moving to a unified monitoring tool• The savings potential of improved IT operations through productivity and efficiency• The business impact of monitoring tools in preventing and reducing both downtime and service degradation
Download the paper now!
This white paper is a Windows PowerShell guide for beginners. If you are an IT Professional with little-to-no experience with PowerShell and want to learn more about this powerful scripting framework, this quick-start guide is for you. With the PowerShell engine, you can automate daily management of Windows-based servers, applications and platforms. This e-book provides the fundamentals every PowerShell administrator needs to know. The getting started guide will give you a crash course on PowerShell essential terms, concepts and commands and help you quickly understand PowerShell basics.
You will also learn about:
This white paper focuses on PowerShell 4.0; however, you can be sure that all the basics provided are relevant to earlier versions as well. For those who are ready to take the next steps in learning PowerShell and looking for more information on the topic, this PDF contains a list of helpful resources.
Microsoft’s Active Directory (AD) offers IT system administrators a central way to manage user accounts and devices in an IT infrastructure network. Active Directory authenticates and authorizes users when they log onto devices and into applications, and allows them to use the settings and files across all devices in the network. Active Directory services are involved in multiple aspects of networking environments and enable interplay with other directories. Considering the important role AD plays in user data-management and security, it’s important to deploy it properly and consistently follow best practices.
Active Directory Basics is a tutorial that will help you address many AD management challenges. You’ll learn what really goes on under the Active Directory hood, including its integration with network services and the features that enable its many great benefits. This white paper also explains how administrators can make changes in AD to provide consistency across an environment.
In addition, the Active Directory Basics tutorial explains how to:
Optimizing the way applications are delivered and managed has been an ongoing challenge in enterprise IT, and the variety of approaches over the years have been received with varying degrees of success. While every method has pros and cons, some of the most stubborn issues include time-to-deliver, application conflicts, plug-ins and licensing. The too-frequent result is high IT overhead, too many gold images and excess spending on application licenses.
Too many companies are settling on less than optimal solutions because that is all they are presented with and they are unaware of the true state of the art for application management. It is possible to dramatically reduce the number of Windows gold images, in some cases to a single image. It is possible to deliver exactly what each and every end user needs to do their job, and nothing else. It is possible for a user to log into a random system and instantly be presented with their personal desktop, all the right applications, plugins and add-ons, the right printers, and the right fonts. It is possible and it is simple.
Citrix AppDisk, when integrated with FSLogix Apps, provides a unique set of features that can improve end-user productivity, reduce IT overhead and lower the cost of desktop management. With FSLogix patent pending Image Masking technology, AppDisk gains very granular and powerful user-based policy control over every aspect of a user’s desktop and applications, and enhances the ability to distribute applications on network attached disk images. FSLogix Apps also enable AppDisks to scale to a much greater degree than any other similar technologies available today.
A simple truth: Current application delivery and deployment solutions for Windows®-based desktops are often not fast enough, and the methods employed introduce complexities and limitations that cost enterprises valuable time, money and productivity. There is a strong need for a solution that is faster to deploy, simpler to use, and improves productivity rather than degrades it. In fact, the best solution would seamlessly and instantaneously personalizing the entire desktop, from profiles and printers to applications and extensions, while supporting license compliance and cost optimization. And, of course, it wouldn’t matter if the target desktops were physical, virtual, or cloud-based. FSLogix is delivering that solution today.
UNIQUE, CUTTING EDGE TECHNOLOGY
This year, Zenoss conducted its third annual State of Converged Infrastructure survey with 410 global IT leaders to explore how they are using converged infrastructure to respond to business needs for agility and speed. The survey received responses from 410 global IT professionals. A few highlights from the report:
There are many open source monitoring tools available today that provide a cost-effective alternative for tackling baseline infrastructure monitoring challenges – Ganglia, Groundwork, Nagios, Zabbix, and Zenoss Core are just a few.
However, not every tool is right for every environment.
Weighing the strengths and weaknesses of open-source offerings is essential to determining whether they will work to meet your specific goals.
This paper provides technically savvy IT decision makers with the detailed performance and resource configuration information needed to analyze the trade-offs involved in setting up an optimal data protection and business continuity plan to support a service level agreement (SLA) with line of business (LoB) executives.
To test backup performance, they created 2,000 AD users and utilized LoadGen to generate email traffic. Each user received 120 messages and sent 20 messages over an 8-hour workday. Using this load level, we established performance baselines for a data protection using direct SAN-based agentless VM backups.
In this scenario they were able to :
The only way to recover a VM with full functionality and full performance without performing an explicit restore operation is through VM replication. Maintaining a replica VM, however, requires frequent and potentially expensive update processes that involve both explicit backup and implicit restore operations. To enable the extensive use of replication by IT, VMBackup adds critical optimizations to both restore and replication operations that dramatically minimize overhead on ESXi hosts and production VMs to just VM snapshot processing. Specifically, a BDR Backup server running on a VM is able to leverage hot-add SCSI transfer mode to write logical disk and logical disk snapshot files directly to a vSphere datastore, without involving the ESXi host for anything more than creating a VM snapshot.
A key a value proposition for Vembu VMBackup is its ability to directly read and write all backup and restore data directly to and from a datastore snapshot. As a result, Vembu VMBackup offloads all I/O overhead from production VMs and ESXi hosts, which is critical for maintaining an aggressive DRM strategy in a highly active virtual environment. What’s more, the performance of Vembu VMBackup in openBench lab's test environment made it possible to enhance support for a mission-critical OLTP application running on a VM using a combination of incremental backups for backup and replication. As a result, they were able to comply with a 30-minute RPO, restore the VM to a production environment in 5 minutes, and return to full-production level processing of business transactions—850 cTPS—in under 15 minutes.
VMBackup adds a new replica management module that enables an IT administrator to fully manage an initial failover and later finalize failover or failback with consolidation. In addition, BDR backup server simplifies all management functions by eliminating the need to run a separate client module on a BDR backup server, which becomes its own client within the BDR reporting hierarchy.
If it appears that this analyst is impressed with Vembu, he is. Vembu’s feature set surpasses what one might presume to come from a backup company that most folks (in North America at least) haven’t heard of.And although it would be easy to assume that some of Vembu’s capabilities are mere boasts, the hesitations wash away with the recognition that this is a vendor with ten years in the business, and that well over half its workforce are R&D engineers. Said another way, Vembu appears to have been quietly solving its customers’ backup challenges for more than a decade through technology, instead of marketing.
In fact, not only did Vembu not have a marketing team until 2015, but it also didn’t have a sales team to speak of. This is an incredibly engineering-focused company—one whose revenues and customers have accumulated through word of mouth. But now, Vembu is building out a solid U.S.-based sales and marketing engine focused on penetrating awareness among IT decision makers, especially decision makers in the SMB segment.
The product Vembu will push in 2015, BDR 2.0, could be a “game changer” for Vembu’s growth. BDR appears to have the potential to quite effectively address the varied requirements of small and midmarket businesses who run mixed physical and virtual IT environments and who also want to leverage the cloud.
If Vembu continues to invest as much into its North American marketing and channel outreach programs as it historically has invested into engineering its technology, then 2015 could be the year that a lot of SMBs discover the “secret” to solving a lot of their backup problems.
European and APJ businesses may know Vembu, but many U.S. IT organizations will be surprised by the solution set of this ten-year-old company that is launching its first concerted marketing push into North America.