Chapter 1: An Introduction to VMware Virtualization
Chapter 2: Backup and Recovery Methodologies
Chapter 3: Data Recovery in Virtual Environments
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.
You're facing VM sprawl if you're experiencing an uncontrollable increase of unused and unneeded objects in your virtual VMware environment. VM sprawl occurs often in virtual infrastructures because they expand much faster than physical, which can make management a challenge. The growing number of virtualized workloads and applications generate “virtual junk” causing VM sprawl issue. Eventually it can put you at risk of running out of resources.
Getting virtual sprawl under control will help you reallocate and better provision your existing storage, CPU and memory resources between critical production workloads and high-performance, virtualized applications. With proper resource management, you can save money on extra hardware.
This white paper examines how you can avoid potential VM sprawl risks and automate proactive monitoring by using Veeam ONE, a part of Veeam Availability Suite. Veeam ONE will arm you with a list of VM sprawl indicators and explain how you can pick up and configure a handy report kit to detect and eliminate VM sprawl threats in your VMware environment.
Read this FREE white paper and learn how to:
This whitepaper provides an overview of Citrix AppDNA with Liquidware Labs FlexApp.
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
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.
The ability to configure and deploy high-performance VMs within a vSphere virtual environment continues to put CIO’s under increasing pressure to deal with the rampant bête noire of IT: business continuity. What started with Line of Business (LoB) driven Service Level Agreements (SLAs) requiring IT to meet rigorous Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives (RTO and RPO) has grown into an auditable ISO standard (ISO22301) and an emerging software niche for Disaster Recovery Management (DRM) systems.
For this analysis, openBench Labs assessed the performance and functionality of the Vembu OffsiteDR Server, a DRM device that increases the resilience of recovery processes. Their initial intent was to examine the ability to restore data in the event of a catastrophic failure in vSphere environment, including:
The full capabilities of Vembu OffsiteDR Server, however, quickly revealed that the device had a much broader operational impact. With the installation of OffsiteDR Server on an external physical server, they were free to configure end-to-end backup and restore operations in a way that optimized RTO and RPO for all business-critical application scenarios running in vSphere test environment.
In openBench lab's test environment, the combination of Vembu OffsiteDR Server deployed on a physical server with a Vembu BDR Backup server deployed on a VM provided a value proposition that extended far beyond the enhancement of DRM recovery resilience. With OffsiteDR Server installed on a physical server, they were able to optimally leverage VM and physical server platforms to easily implement all of the data protection functionality provided by Vembu BDR Suite, leverage all of the performance optimizations available to VMs in a vSphere environment, and do so in the most cost-effective system configuration.
Vembu has grown its revenue 35% annually over the past two years and is on track to meet that mark in 2014. Key product additions this year include a suite of CRM applications and the introduction of onpremises virtual appliances (with physical appliances to come in the near future). The latter move puts Vembu in more direct competition with relatively well known players in the hybrid cloud backup battle.
Vembu is celebrating its 10 year anniversary by exceeding the 60,000 customer milestone, sold mainly through its 4,400 channel partners. That compares with 55,000 customers and 4,000 resellers in February 2014. The company has added 400 resellers so far this year, and has begun to emphasize VARs in addition to its traditional target market of MSPs. Notable serviceprovider partners include Verizon's Terremark subsidiary, mindSHIFT Technologies, HostPapa and Hitachi Data Systems. The profitable Vembu claims to have exceeded 35% revenue growth in each of the past two years, and is on track for similar gains this year.
The company expects to have 200 employees by the end of 2014 (up from 160 in February), and 300 by the end of 2015. Most of its employees are near its headquarters in Chennai, India (with 65% engaged in R&D), but Vembu has been steadily expanding internationally. It opened an office in London this year, and relocated its US headquarters to Addison, Texas, where it expects to grow its workforce from 15 employees this year to 50 next year Vembu's worldwide distribution of partners roughly equates to its worldwide revenue distribution: 70% North America, 20% Europe and 10% AsiaPacific – a distribution that has remained fairly steady over the past year. However, although about 30% of its revenue comes from outside North America today, Vembu hopes to increase that to 50% in 2015. Key target markets for 2015 include the EU5 countries, Scandinavia, Brazil and China
So you’ve invested in virtualization - now what does it take to make that virtual environment hum? Before, during and after deploying, you need a modern monitoring solution to ensure you’re getting the most of your investment. We’ve compiled the 5 keys for conquering downtime and achieving virtualization bliss.
Zenoss makes managing virtualized environments and virtualization monitoring easy and less expensive. The Zenoss hybrid IT monitoring platform allows you to comprehensively monitor resource performance and availability across the entire stack, including network, storage, applications and more, regardless of physical or virtual location.
OVERVIEW
The virtualization of physical computers has become the backbone of public and private cloud computing from desktops to data centers, enabling organizations to optimize hardware utilization, enhance security, support multi-tenancy and more. These environments are complex and ephemeral, creating requirements and challenges beyond the capability of traditional monitoring tools that were originally designed for static physical environments. But modern solutions exist, and can bring your virtual environment to new levels of efficiency, performance and scale.
This guide explains the pervasiveness of virtualized environments in modern data centers, the demand these environments create for more robust monitoring and analytics solutions, and the keys to getting the most out of virtualization deployments.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
· History and Expansion of Virtualized Environments
· Monitoring Virtual Environments
· Approaches to Monitoring
· Why Effective Virtualization Monitoring Matters
· A Unified Approach to Monitoring Virtualized Environments
· 5 Key Capabilities for Virtualization Monitoring
o Real-Time Awareness
o Rapid Root-Cause Analytics
o End-to-End Visibility
o Complete Flexibility
o Hypervisor Agnosticism
· Evaluating a Monitoring Solution
o Unified View
o Scalability
o CMDB Support
o Converged Infrastructure
o Licensing
· Zenoss for Virtualization Monitoring