Virtualization Spotlight

Date Smart Dynamic Export from esXpress

VMSpotlight — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:47:37 GMT

It’s been a while since we’ve talked a bit a bout esXpress‘ features. In this post we’ll be looking at the “Date Smart Dynamic Export”, which allows you to pinpoint the virtual data you want to archive, and combine it with your physical backup data.

Utilizing Patent Pending technology, esXpress’ Date Smart Dynamic Export (an extensive set of pre-defined date categories), provides a seamless path for moving uncompressed, native VMDK and VMX files to tape when combined with traditional solutions such as Symantec Backup Exec, IBM TSM, EMC Legato, or HP Data Protector. Since the esXpress software is not required to run restores, future restoration from tape is fast and easy.

The Optimal Combination for the Future of Data Protection

Today’s system administrator must protect the systems they’re responsible for with the best software available. esXpress in coordination with existing backup solutions, yields a faster data to tape backup, creating the optimal combination for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity.

VMs are moved to disk by esXpress and then tape backup can occur during normal business hours as no production VMs are affected. Tape data consists of VMs in their native state, consuming fewer tapes (up to 50%) and fewer resources associated with tapes (off-site storage fees, tape costs, and legacy agent licensing). Reduction in virtual machine backup times, together with faster restoration and reduced costs, represents the future of data protection.

Disaster Recovery tools such as NetBackup, BackupExec, TSM, Data Protector, Networker, Avamar, CommVault, Arcserve and others, provide effective protection against data loss, however, as virtualization progresses through the corporate environment, new backup tools are required. esXpress complements your existing DR implementation with the best Virtual to Disk Backup & Disaster Recovery solution in the industry.

Agent-Based Solutions and Tape Storage: The Shortcomings

Agent-based backup solutions solve critical needs in the current IT landscape. These solutions effectively quiesce applications while allowing users to continue to use those mission-critical applications on the physical server. Data stored on physical hosts must be protected and applications such as file servers, databases, and messaging, each povide unique challenges when it comes to backup.

Currently, the most cost-effective, off-site, backup storage medium is tape. And mature, agent-based backup solutions efficiently move data from disk to tape. While tape is not as fast for restoration as disk may be, tapes have the benefit of assuring backups are not on the physical premises in case of a disaster. Unfortunately, though, agent-based technologies have not been able to grow with virtualization. Recovery of an entire system with an agent-based backup preserves only the data—the entire system must be reloaded—including the operating system, applications, and the agent before any data can be restored.

Data Center DR: Best-of-Breed Solution

esXpress and legacy backup solutions work together to provide a best of breed solution for data center disaster recovery. Though legacy solutions provide effective backup of physical servers, as well as disk-to-tape solutions, esXpress provides the fastest backups from virtual machines to disk. Utilizing our date smart export directory, esXpress provides a direct path for legacy backups to take uncompressed native VMDK and VMX files to tape. Future restoration from tape is quick and easy as the esXpress software is not required for the restoration.

To achieve the lowest time-to-restoration in a virtual environment, block level backups utilizing VCB are often deployed. Unfortunately, VCB requires additional hardware and can not provide the number of concurrent streams necessary to meet backup windows.

Backups in a virtual environment should be performed with a solution tailored to the emerging virtualization technology. esXpress utilizes virtual machines to provide up to 16 concurrent backup streams direct to target per ESX host. Utilizing virtual machines requires no additional hardware or software licensing, and provides a superior level of fault-tolerance. In addition, each backup stream is compressed and deduplicated before the data ever leaves the host.

Oxford University Simplifies VMware Data Protection/Recovery with esXpress

VMSpotlight — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:42:36 GMT

Oxford University’s Network Systems Management Services (NSMS) Group Uses esXpress for Low Cost VMware Backup and Recovery

PHD Virtual Technologies, provider of the pioneering esXpress VMware backup and recovery solution, today announced that Oxford University’s Network Systems Management Services (NSMS) group relies on esXpress to provide data protection and recovery for its VMware environment of 14 ESX servers. esXpress delivers scalable, highly available and cost effective VMware backup and restore capabilities for Oxford University without added hardware or software investments.

Oxford University has been educating people from all walks of life and all parts of the world for more than nine centuries. The first university in the English-speaking world, Oxford University today remains at the forefront of learning, teaching and research. Students from more than 140 countries and territories make up a student population of over 20,000, with over a third coming from outside the United Kingdom. These students are educated by 38 independent and self-governing colleges and six permanent private halls.

The Oxford University NSMS supports the expansive information services for these colleges and halls through an elaborate information technology infrastructure that is offered as a shared managed service to each of the university’s colleges and departments. At the backbone of this infrastructure is Oxford NSMS’ VMware virtualization environment including a dual-site setup with 14 ESX servers, and a single-site ESX cluster based on 10 blades. This virtual environment serves as the central computing center for the entire Oxford University system including support for student records, university email services, web servers, content management systems and university databases.

To assure reliable data protection for its virtual infrastructure, Oxford University selected PHD Virtual’s esXpress for its simplicity, scalability and unique Virtual Backup Appliance architecture which enables the virtual environment to back itself up. As such, Oxford University NSMS is able to meet its data protection and recovery requirements for high availability without added hardware or software costs.

“esXpress is a reliable, easy to use backup solution that fits seamlessly into our VMware environment,” said Jon Hutchings, senior system administrator, Oxford University NSMS. “It has saved us a tremendous amount of time and money by using the power of our virtual machines to protect themselves. Now, we no longer need to spend hours locating backup tapes like we did with our previous tape backup solution. Backups are performed seamlessly to disk making restores faster and much more reliable.”

esXpress is a revolutionary VMware backup and data protection solution that uses the virtual environment itself to perform the
backup, in less time, and at a lower cost. Key benefits of esXpress for Oxford University include:

1.) Fault-Tolerance – esXpress is VMware DRS/HA-aware and VMotion compatible making it more reliable and more stable than other solutions

2.) Backs Up More Data in Less Time – With up to 16 concurrent backup streams per ESX host, esXpress enables Oxford to significantly reduce their backup window

3.) Leverages Existing Infrastructure Investments – esXpress’ Data Smart Dynamic Export enables Oxford to leverage its investment in existing physical backup solutions to minimize total cost of ownership

To learn more about esXpress or to download a free trial version, please visit: http://www.phdvirtual.com/products/esxpress-virtual-backup.

PHD Virtual Releases esXpress 4.0

VMSpotlight — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:14:57 GMT

During VMworld 2009, PHD Virtual Technologies, provider of the pioneering esXpress data protection and recovery solution for virtual machines, announced the release of esXpress version 4.0.

This major new release of the most scalable and cost effective VMware backup solution on the market has added changed block tracking to reduce the amount of time and resources required to create backups and a unified central restore GUI to restore data faster and easier than ever before.
“PHD Virtual has developed an efficient solution for the data protection and recovery of virtual machines,” said Laura DuBois, program director, storage software, IDC. “By creating small virtual machines – virtual backup appliances (VBAs) – esXpress uses the virtual environment itself to perform the backups, eliminating the need for added hardware or software resources.”

The new esXpress version 4.0 adds enhanced support for VMware vSphere 4 in addition to ESX 3.x, including the ability to track changes to each VMDK using VMware’s change tracking API. By reading only the blocks that have changed, and not scanning the entire virtual disk each time a backup is performed, esXpress shortens the backup window and uses considerably less data I/O while also reducing overall loads on network and SAN resources.

“By utilizing the changed block data API to do incremental backups, esXpress 4.0 significantly reduces critical backup windows and lowers storage contention,” said Ron McKelvey, CTO, PHD Virtual. “This allows for greater scalability and more frequent backups to meet any virtual environment’s data protection objectives.”

esXpress is the first and only third-party solution that uses multiple virtual backup appliances to leverage the VMware changed block API. In addition to changed block tracking, esXpress 4.0 has also added the ability to initiate VM restores from within the Configuration and Deployment Virtual Appliance GUI. The GUI appliance provides unified management of virtual machine recovery tasks, bypassing the need to connect to each individual ESX host’s Service Console. Using this centralized interface, restoring data is simpler, faster, and more scalable than ever before.

Pricing and Availability
esXpress 4.0 is available now with pricing starting at $1,000 per host for four concurrent backup streams delivering the best price/performance for data recovery and protection in virtual environments. The product supports unlimited sockets and unlimited cores per host and no additional hardware is required.

You may also learn about esXpress by visiting PHD Virtual’s virtual VMworld booth: here

To download a free trial version of esXpress, please visit: http://www.phdvirtual.com/products/esxpress-virtual-backup

Theron & Rich Jazz up the VMworld 2009 Sunday Night Extravaganza

VMSpotlight — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:53:32 GMT

Theron Conrey (twitter/blog) and Rich Brambley (twitter/blog) have been discussing the very real point that the VMworld 2009 Sunday Night Extravaganza needed a Mission Statement, and the VMworld Underground needed a motto.

Hence:

This year at VMworld they will be sporting the motto: “federating your private cloud with others”.

They have also made a t-shirt. They will raffle a few away at the Sunday night party, but you can get one for yourself at http://www.cafepress.com/vmetc.401858661# (if this link fails include the “#”).

If you order for 6 or more you will receive an additional discount automatically when you purchase.

They are not making any profit on this shirt. Cafepress and the shipping company probably is, but hey, they make it easy to get one of these.

We hope to see a lot of you with “the cloud” in your head in San Francisco.

Content sourced from vmetc.com

esXpress 3.5/3.6 Videos: File Level Restore Tutorial &

VMSpotlight — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:24:08 GMT

These videos feature Doug Soltesz, Snr Technical Sales Engineer at PHD Virtual presenting tutorials on file level restore and dynamic exports in esXpress 3.5/3.6

esXpress 3.5/3.6 File Level Restore Tutorial - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-LFpsW8y7w

esXpress 3.5/3.6 Dynamic Exports Tutorial - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHB9zvdNVwY

We'll also be posting a multi-part video tutorial on the install process for esXpress very soon!

Microsoft claims Hyper-V has 24% virtualization market share

VMSpotlight — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 21:17:12 GMT

This story first appeared on Virtualization.info today.

Last week the authoritative news service of Dow Jones reported that Microsoft Hyper-V now has 24% of the virtualization market share.

The claim comes from Microsoft itself, specifically from Kevin Turner, the company COO, that said:

"We launched our first product in October of this past year. From then till now, we gained 24 points of market share against a very, very formidable competitor."

VMware didn’t provide an official reply to Dow Jones, but answered to the virtualization.info inquiry by saying that there’s no evidence they are aware of to support this statement.

There’s lots of speculation as to whether this is “actually true”. If it is the case this would be a giant leap for Microsoft. Last time somebody checked the reports were pretty different:

In March 2008 Gartner reported that the Microsoft market share was equal to 7%.
In October 2008 IDC reported that the Microsoft market share was equal to 23%, but that number was obtained by aggregating the distribution of Hyper-V and Virtual Server

View the full post here: http://virtualization-spotlight.com/microsoft-claims-hyper-v-has-24-virtualization-market-share/

Top 10 Virtualization People on Twitter

VMSpotlight — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:31:46 GMT

It’s been a while since we’ve mentioned Twitter here at Virtualization-Spotlight. There are loads of accounts out there focused on virtualization, but the ones that every VM buff should be following are the people who tend to get deeply involved in the online community.

Here are our top 10 Tweeters!

Eric Sloof – NTPro.NL – @esloof
Duncan Epping – Yellow-Bricks.com – @depping
Gabe Van Zanten – GabesVirtualWorld.com – @gabvirtualworld
Jason Boche – Boche.net Blog – @jasonboche
Eric Siebert – vSphere-land.com – @ericsiebert
Daniel Eason – VMLover Blog – @daniel_eason
Mike Laverick – rtfm-ed.co.uk – @Mike_Laverick
Tom Howarth – PlanetVM.net – @tom_howarth
Scott Lowe – blog.ScottLowe.org – @scott_lowe
Rich Brambley – VMEtc.com – @rbrambley

PHD Virtual Extends esXpress to Support Virtual Machine Data Protection and Recovery for VMware vSphere 4

VMSpotlight — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:09:05 GMT

PHD Virtual Technologies, provider of the pioneering esXpress data protection and recovery solution for virtual machines, today announced that esXpress 3.6 has been extended to support VMware vSphere 4. This new release of esXpress also includes significant enhancements for all versions of VMware’s ESX platform version 3.0.2 and above.

An optimized deduplication engine dramatically increases backup speeds and fuels performance for file-level restores, as well as VMDK restores and data archival via a Windows Share.

“PHD Virtual’s esXpress was the first solution to truly take advantage of virtualization by intelligently using the virtual machine to back itself up,” said Dave Bartoletti, senior analyst and consultant, Taneja Group. “With new support for vSphere, esXpress is a scalable, cost effective backup solution which can protect virtual environments without additional hardware or software investments.”

esXpress, with new support for vSphere 4, performs backup and recovery using the virtual environment itself. By creating virtual backup appliances (VBAs) – small virtual machines – the solution can be deployed in minutes on VMware servers, and provides the most scalable environment for backing up virtual machines.

New performance enhancements include:

Improved file level restore speeds are now up to four times faster
Data Restoration and Archival via Windows’ Shares are now up to four times faster
Improved PHDD deduplication image-level restore speeds up to twice as fast
Accelerated deduplication engine provides initial backups that are seeded at double the previous rates

esXpress continues to support up to 16 concurrent backup/restore streams per host and all backups can be self-restored without using esXpress or other proprietary virtual machine infrastructure. esXpress’ block level backups are de-duplicated source side, ensuring data is compressed and deduped before it every leaves the host. This ensures that network traffic is kept to a minimum even while backing up over a WAN link.

“Along with now supporting VMware vSphere 4, we continue to enhance esXpress’ performance so that all customers can benefit from these performance improvements in any VMware environment, 3.0.2 and above,” said Joe Julian, executive chairman, PHD Virtual. “esXpress continues to simplify backup and recovery for virtual machines while lowering costs by reducing hardware requirements. This helps organizations relying on their virtual infrastructure to receive unprecedented economies of scale, simplicity and management.”

Pricing and Availability

esXpress 3.6 supporting VMware vSphere 4, is currently available in small business and enterprise versions. Pricing starts at $1,000 per host with unlimited number of sockets. For more information or to download a trial version, please visit http://www.phdvirtual.com/products/esxpress-virtual-backup.

esXpress Comparison Document

VMSpotlight — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 10:45:47 GMT

This document was released a few weeks ago and it’s just been pointed out that we havn’t got it up here on our blog!

esXpress 3.5 by PHD Virtual uses multiple virtual backup appliances (VBA’s) to provide highly scalable, high throughput, simultaneous de‐duplicated backups of virtual machines. The use of de‐duplication technology in all backups, which are performed source side at the block level mean that backups are fast and storage efficient. One highly unique feature of the esXpress product is the ability to restore virtual machine backups without requiring the esXpress software installed. The restore mechanism is built into the backup itself making it highly portable as well as providing the simplest and most versatile restore process in the market.

For more information on esXpress 3.5 product visit: http://www.phdvirtual.com/products/esxpress-virtual‐backup

To download a free trial of esXpress 3.5 please visit: http://phdvirtual.com/register

The document available for download from the link below compares esXpress 3.5 against VMware Data Recovery 1.0, Vizioncore vRanger Pro 3.2.8.1, and Veeam Backup & Replication 3.1.

Download the document HERE.

This article is also available here: http://virtualization-spotlight.com/esxpress-comparison-document/

Veeam Backup 3.1 – puzzled by decrease in backup performance

VMSpotlight — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:19:08 GMT

On Sunday Eric Sloof wrote a blog post highlighing a potential issue with version 3.1 of Veeam Backup. The main focus of the discussion surrounds drastic reductions in back-up speed with servers upgraded to vSphere 4.

The people at Vizoncore and Veeam have posted on the subject in several online spaces also. One of Veeam’s product managers who runs a blog has posted on this topic here: http://www.vnotion.com/?p=38 explaining testing he has done on the issue.

View the VMTN discussion thread here: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1302322

Jason Mattox and Steve Philip also contributed to the discussion (excerpts below from Eric Sloof’s blog):

Jason Mattox :

Putting my differences aside, (I’m from vizioncore) and wanting to see this fixes for all VMware users, here is what it think is going on. I think this is due to the read speeds from VMFS on ESX 4 VS ESX 3. Give this test a try, create a 10 GB VM and run this command, how does it take on ESX 3 vs ESX 4? You have to remember that VCB over the network is using VMware API’s which are going to get more disk/read time. I think VMware has starved the COS reads again. I think this same thing happened from ESX 2.5.x to 3.0 and when 3.0.1 came out it was fixed, I’m not 100% on that ,but I think that’s what happened. time cat
JM_10GB_Test-flat.vmdk > /dev/null

Steve Philp :

As the person that posted the original question both on VMware’s forum and on Veeam’s forum, I can tell you that we’re all just waiting for VMware to acknowledge and fix the issue. We have been working with VMware tech support for a few weeks now, providing them with backup and file copy performance data involving the Service Console. We have no idea whether they’re seeing other reports of the issue, they haven’t been very forthcoming with info. I can confirm that the backup speed problem ONLY affects transfers using the Service Console. Using VCB / SAN mode in Veeam Backup allows full backup speed. Here’s the followup posting on my blog with our “lesson’s learned”.

Hyper-V Security Guide

VMSpotlight — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:00:13 GMT

This info came from a recent post on the Microsoft Virtualization User Group UK blog.

It’s about the Hyper-V Security Guide at TechNet. The document is 41 pages long covering all security problems you should consider when deploying Hyper-V in your environment.

This is a must-read for every system administrator who is considering deploying Hyper-V, so check out the direct download Hyper-V Security Guide from Techet.

The Hyper-V Security Guide provides IT professionals with guidance, instructions, and recommendations to address key security concerns about server virtualization.

Microsoft Hyper-V technology allows consolidation of workloads that are currently spread across multiple underutilized servers onto a smaller number of servers. This capability provides a way to reduce costs through lower hardware, energy, and management overhead while creating a more dynamic IT infrastructure.

The Hyper-V Security Guide can help you elevate the security of virtualized Windows Server environments to address your business-critical needs.

Read the full post here: http://virtualization-spotlight.com/hyper-v-security-guide/

PHD Virtual Releases New Freeware Solution: Patch Downloader v6.0

VMSpotlight — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:38:44 GMT

http://phdvirtual.com/

PHD Virtual Technologies, provider of the pioneering esXpress data protection and recovery solution for virtual machines, today announced availability of Patch Downloader version 6.0, a new freeware solution to simplify patch downloading for various VMware ESX versions.

Patch Downloader version 6.0 is the fifth free virtualization utility to be offered by PHD Virtual as part of its longstanding commitment to the virtualization community.

Patch Downloader v6.0 eases the pain of downloading patches for various ESX versions from the VMware support site by automating the process for users that cannot use the VMware Update Manager. Now, rather than downloading each patch manually through a Java Download manager, VMware administrators can simply select the version of ESX from the Patch downloader drop down menu, and select the file repository (including folder, drive map, SMB share, etc.) to download the patches to. The new freeware solution will list all of the available patches and information about the patches including severity of the problem it corrects, what the impact on VM/Host uptime is, and a description of the problem fixed. Downloads of selected patches are performed with a simple click making it easy to keep the ESX patch repository up to date.

Read the full post here: PHD Virtual Releases New Freeware Solution: Patch Downloader v6.0

Roy Mikes announces esXpress comparison document

VMSpotlight — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:17:29 GMT

This weekend virtualization blogger Roy Mikes (of http://Mikes.eu)
was one of the first people online to release a product comparison
document comparing PHD Virtual’s groundbreaking backup solution esXpress 3.5 to other solutions, including Visioncore’s vRanger, Veeam Backup & Replication 3.1, and VMware vDR 1.0.

Roy can also be found on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/teovmy

You can also read the article here: http://virtualization-spotlight.com/roy-mikes-announces-esxpress-comparison-document/

Xtravirt Review esXpress 3.5

VMSpotlight — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:11:00 GMT

Last Tuesday virtualization knowledge buffs Xtravirt published their review of esXpress 3.5!

The review was written by technical author Peter Grant and is suitable for people at the level of “Technical – Novice”.

The main sections in the review include:

Introduction
Background
Features and Capabilities
Gotchas / Troubleshooting
Licensing
Summary
Useful References

You can view the review here: http://xtravirt.com/node/182

http://xtravirt.com/node/182

VMTN.nl checks out esXpress 3.5.6

VMSpotlight — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:32:59 GMT

Frank Van Egmond who blogs over at VMTN.nl posted an article looking at the great features in esXpress 3.5.6 on Monday.

The article covers “New in 3.5 features” including:

Automatic deployment of esXpress
Hierarchical and policy driven configuration
Definable host groups with all hosts assigned to that group using the same standard configuration
Hosts can inherit their configuration from global and group policies
Host level overrides for esXpress configuration
Centralized Backup Targets – create backup targets one time and assign to hosts and groups

We were also glad to see he noticed that you can use esXpress out of the box with multiple version of VMware, so there is no need to wait for a move vSphere 4 to use virtual technology to back up virtual machines! Nice one Frank!

Check out his blog here: http://www.vmtn.nl/