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.

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

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

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:

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

Pricing and Availability

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”.

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

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:

1. Introduction
2. Background
3. Features and Capabilities
4. Gotchas / Troubleshooting
5. Licensing
6. Summary
7. Useful References