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.
In 2001, Microsoft introduced the RDP protocol that allowed users to access an operating system’s desktop remotely. Since then, Microsoft has developed the Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS) to facilitate remote desktop access.
However, Microsoft RDS leaves a lot to be desired. This white paper highlights the pain points of RDS solutions, and how systems administrators can use Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS) to enhance their Microsoft RDS infrastructure.
Microsoft RDS Pain Points:• Limited Load Balancing Functionality• Limited Client Device Support• Difficult to Install, Set Up, and Update
Parallels RAS is an application and virtual desktop delivery solution that allows systems administrators to create a private cloud from which they can centrally manage the delivery of applications, virtual desktops, and business-critical data. This comprehensive VDI solution is well known for its ease of use, low license costs, and feature list.
How Parallels RAS Enhances Your Microsoft RDS Infrastructure:• Easy to Install and Set Up• Centralized Configuration Console• Auto-Configuration of Remote Desktop Session Hosts• High Availability Load Balancing (HALB)• Superior user experience on mobile devices• Supports hypervisors from Citrix, VMware, Microsoft’s own Hyper-V, Nutanix Acropolis, and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
As this white paper highlights, Parallels RAS allows you to enhance your Microsoft Remote Desktop Services infrastructure, enabling you to offer a superior application and virtual desktop delivery solution.
Built around Microsoft’s RDP protocol, Parallels RAS allows systems administrators to do more in less time with fewer resources. Since it is easier to implement and use, systems administrators can manage and easily scale up the Parallels RAS farm without requiring any specialized training. Because of its extensive feature list and multisite support, they can build solutions that meet the requirements of any enterprise, regardless of its size and scale.
If you’re here to gather some of the best practices surrounding vSphere, you’ve come to the right place! Mastering vSphere: Best Practices, Optimizing Configurations & More, the free eBook authored by me, Ryan Birk, is the product of many years working with vSphere as well as teaching others in a professional capacity. In my extensive career as a VMware consultant and teacher (I’m a VMware Certified Instructor) I have worked with people of all competence levels and been asked hundreds - if not thousands - of questions on vSphere. I was approached to write this eBook to put that experience to use to help people currently working with vSphere step up their game and reach that next level. As such, this eBook assumes readers already have a basic understanding of vSphere and will cover the best practices for four key aspects of any vSphere environment.
The best practices covered here will focus largely on management and configuration solutions so should remain relevant for quite some time. However, with that said, things are constantly changing in IT, so I would always recommend obtaining the most up-to-date information from VMware KBs and official documentation especially regarding specific versions of tools and software updates. This eBook is divided into several sections, and although I would advise reading the whole eBook as most elements relate to others, you might want to just focus on a certain area you’re having trouble with. If so, jump to the section you want read about.
Before we begin, I want to note that in a VMware environment, it’s always best to try to keep things simple. Far too often I have seen environments be thrown off the tracks by trying to do too much at once. I try to live by the mentality of “keeping your environment boring” – in other words, keeping your host configurations the same, storage configurations the same and network configurations the same. I don’t mean duplicate IP addresses, but the hosts need identical port groups, access to the same storage networks, etc. Consistency is the name of the game and is key to solving unexpected problems down the line. Furthermore, it enables smooth scalability - when you move from a single host configuration to a cluster configuration, having the same configurations will make live migrations and high availability far easier to configure without having to significantly re-work the entire infrastructure. Now the scene has been set, let’s get started!
With digital transformation a constantly evolving reality for the modern organization, businesses are called upon to manage complex workloads across multiple public and private clouds—in addition to their on-premises systems. The upside of the hybrid cloud strategy is that businesses can benefit from both lowered costs and dramatically increased agility and flexibility. The problem, however, is maintaining a secure environment through challenges like data security, regulatory compliance, external threats to the service provider, rogue IT usage and issues related to lack of visibility into the provider’s infrastructure.
Find out how to optimize your hybrid cloud workload through system hardening, incident detection, active defense and mitigation, quarantining and more. Plus, learn how to ensure protection and performance in your environment through an ideal hybrid cloud workload protection solution that:
• Provides the necessary level of protection for different workloads• Delivers an essential set of technologies• Is structured as a comprehensive, multi-layered solution• Avoids performance degradation for services or users• Supports compliance by satisfying a range of regulation requirements• Enforces consistent security policies through all parts of hybrid infrastructure• Enables ongoing audit by integrating state of security reports• Takes account of continuous infrastructure changes
More and more companies come to understand that server virtualization is the way for modern data safety. In 2019, VMware is still the market leader and many Veeam customers use VMware vSphere as their preferred virtualization platform. But, backup of virtual machines on vSphere is only one part of service Availability. Backup is the foundation for restores, so it is essential to have backups always available with the required speed. The “Top 10 Best Practices for vSphere Backups” white paper discusses best practices with Veeam Backup & Replication and VMware vSphere, such as:
• Planning your data restore in advance • Keeping track of your data backup software updates and keeping your backup tools up-to-date• Integrating storage based snapshots into your Availability concept • And much more!
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.