Many large enterprises are moving important applications from traditional physical servers to virtualized environments, such as VMware vSphere in order to take advantage of key benefits such as configuration flexibility, data and application mobility, and efficient use of IT resources.
Realizing these benefits with business critical applications, such as SQL Server or SAP can pose several challenges. Because these applications need high availability and disaster recovery protection, the move to a virtual environment can mean adding cost and complexity and limiting the use of important VMware features. This paper explains these challenges and highlights six key facts you should know about HA protection in VMware vSphere environments that can save you money.
This eBook explains how to identify problems with vSphere and how to solve them. Before we begin, we need to start off with an introduction to a few things that will make life easier. We’ll start with a troubleshooting methodology and how to gather logs. After that, we’ll break this eBook into the following sections: Installation, Virtual Machines, Networking, Storage, vCenter/ESXi and Clustering.
ESXi and vSphere problems arise from many different places, but they generally fall into one of these categories: Hardware issues, Resource contention, Network attacks, Software bugs, and Configuration problems.
A typical troubleshooting process contains several tasks: 1. Define the problem and gather information. 2. Identify what is causing the problem. 3. Fix the problem, implement a fix.
One of the first things you should try to do when experiencing a problem with a host, is try to reproduce the issue. If you can find a way to reproduce it, you have a great way to validate that the issue is resolved when you do fix it. It can be helpful as well to take a benchmark of your systems before they are implemented into a production environment. If you know HOW they should be running, it’s easier to pinpoint a problem.
You should decide if it’s best to work from a “Top Down” or “Bottom Up” approach to determine the root cause. Guest OS Level issues typically cause a large amount of problems. Let’s face it, some of the applications we use are not perfect. They get the job done but they utilize a lot of memory doing it.
In terms of virtual machine level issues, is it possible that you could have a limit or share value that’s misconfigured? At the ESXi Host Level, you could need additional resources. It’s hard to believe sometimes, but you might need another host to help with load!
Once you have identified the root cause, you should assess the impact of the problem on your day to day operations. When and what type of fix should you implement? A short-term one or a long-term solution? Assess the impact of your solution on daily operations. Short-term solution: Implement a quick workaround. Long-term solution: Reconfiguration of a virtual machine or host.
Now that the basics have been covered, download the eBook to discover how to put this theory into practice!
There are many new challenges, and reasons, to migrate workloads to the cloud.
For example, here are four of the most popular:
Whether it is for backup, disaster recovery, or production in the cloud, you should be able to leverage the cloud platform to solve your technology challenges. In this step-by-step guide, we outline how GCP is positioned to be one of the easiest cloud platforms for app development. And, the critical role data protection as-as-service (DPaaS) can play.
There are a number of limitations today keeping organizations from not only lifting and shifting from one cloud to another but also migrating across clouds. Organizations need the flexibility to leverage multiple clouds and move applications and workloads around freely, whether for data reuse or for disaster recovery. This is where the HYCU Protégé platform comes in. HYCU Protégé is positioned as a complete multi-cloud data protection and disaster recovery-as-a-service solution. It includes a number of capabilities that make it relevant and notable compared with other approaches in the market:
Assess what you already have
If you have a business continuity plan or a disaster recovery plan in place, that’s a good place to start. This scenario may not fit the definition of disaster that you originally intended, but it can serve to help you test your plan in a more controlled fashion that can benefit both your current situation by giving you a head start, and your overall plan by revealing gaps that would be more problematic in a more urgent or catastrophic environment with less time to prepare and implement.
Does your plan include access to remote desktops in a data center or the cloud? If so, and you already have a service in place ready to transition or expand, you’re well on your way.
Read the guide to learn what it takes for IT teams to set up staff to work effectively from home with virtual desktop deployments. Learn how to get started, if you’re new to VDI or if you already have an existing remote desktop scenario but are looking for alternatives.
Metallic is a new SaaS backup and recovery solution based on Commvault's data protection software suite, proven in the marketplace for more than 20 years. It is designed specifically for the needs of medium-scale enterprises but is architected to grow with them based on data growth, user growth, or other requirements. Metallic initially offers either monthly or annual subscriptions through reseller partners; it will be available through cloud service providers and managed service providers over time. The initial workload use cases for Metallic include virtual machine (VM), SQL Server, file server, MS Office 365, and endpoint device recovery support; the company expects to add more use cases and supported workloads as the solution evolves.
Metallic is designed to offer flexibility as one of the service's hallmarks. Aspects of this include:
Anyone who works in IT will tell you, losing data is no joke. Ransomware and malware attacks are on the rise, but that’s not the only risk. Far too often, a company thinks data is backed up – when it’s really not. The good news? There are simple ways to safeguard your organization. To help you protect your company (and get a good night’s sleep), our experts share seven common reasons companies lose data – often because it was never really protected in the first place – plus tips to help you avoid the same.
Metallic’s our engineers and product team have decades of combined experience protecting customer data. When it comes to backup and recovery, we’ve seen it all – the good, the bad and the ugly.
We understand backup is not something you want to worry about – which is why we’ve designed MetallicTM enterprise- grade backup and recovery with the simplicity of SaaS. Our cloud-based data protection solution comes with underlying technology from industry-leader Commvault and best practices baked in. Metallic offerings help you ensure your backups are running fast and reliably, and your data is there when you need it. Any company can be up and running with simple, powerful backup and recovery in as little as 15 minutes.
Are You Having Trouble Selling DR to Senior Management?
This white paper gives you strategies for getting on the same page as senior management regarding DR. These strategies include:
Read this whitepaper to learn critical best practices for VMware vSphere with Veeam Backup & Replication v11, such as:
Protecting your data and ensuring its’ availability is one of your top priorities. Like a castle in medieval times, you must always defend it and have built-in defense mechanisms. It is under attack from external and internal sources, and you do not know when or where it will come from. The prevalence of ransomware and the sharp increase in users working from home and on any device adds further complexity and broadens the attack surfaces available to bad actors. So much so, that your organization being hit with ransomware is almost unavoidable. While preventing attacks is important, you also need to prepare for the inevitable fallout of a ransomware incident.
Here are just a few datapoints from recent research around ransomware:• Global Ransomware Damage Costs Predicted To Reach $20 Billion (USD) By 2021 • Ransomware is expected to attack a business every 11 seconds by the end of 2021 • 75% of the world’s population (6 Billion people) will be online by 2022. • Phishing scams account for 90% of attacks. • 55% of small businesses pay hackers the ransom • Ransomware costs are predicted to be 57x more over a span of 6 years by 2021 • New ransomware strains destroy backups, steal credentials, publicly expose victims, leak stolen data, and some even threaten the victim's customers
So how do you prepare? By making sure you’re recovery ready with a layered approach to securing your data. Two proven techniques for reducing the attack surface on your data are data isolation and air gapping. Hitachi Vantara and Commvault deliver this kind of protection with the combination of Hitachi Data Protection Suite (HDPS) and Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) which includes several layers and tools to protect and restore your data and applications from the edge of your business to the core data centers.