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Posts Tagged ‘Hyper-V’

StarWind Releases iSCSI SAN Software Enhanced by VM Backup Technology

January 17th, 2012

Press Release:

New StarWind iSCSI SAN v5.8 and Hyper Backup Plug-in are a New Level of Data Protection

Burlington, MA – January 13, 2012 – StarWind Software Inc., an innovative provider of SAN software for iSCSI storage and VM Backup technology, today announced the release of new StarWind iSCSI SAN v5.8 and Hyper-V Backup Plug-in. The iSCSI SAN software is enhanced by the powerful VM Backup technology that is included as a plug-in.

Backup plug-in is built specifically for Hyper-V-based environments to provide fast backup and restore for Hyper-V virtual machines. The backup solution delivered by StarWind performs all operations on the Hyper-V host level thus it requires no backup agents to be installed on virtual machines (Agentless Architecture).

Hyper-V Backup Plug-in makes fast backups and allows quick, reliable restore of both virtual machines and individual files. It utilizes advanced technologies for maximum disk space saving (Global Deduplication). This backup tool is integrated with StarWind Centralized Management Console that enables managing backup and storage from a single window.

Additionally, a new version of HA plug-in is presented in StarWind iSCSI SAN v5.8 that allows use of raw basic images to create HA targets. A new replication engine based on own technology instead of MS iSCSI transport creates higher performance and reliability. This new engine permits use of multiple network interfaces for synchronization and heartbeat.

To simplify the replacement of equipment and recovery of fatal failures, StarWind Software has implemented the ability to change the partner node to any other StarWind server without any downtime and on the fly. Synchronization engine is improved, and this version allows both nodes to sync automatically even in the case of a full blackout of both servers.

“With the release of StarWind iSCSI SAN v5.8 our company is happy to provide our customers with highly available storage and fast backup software developed by the same vendor,” said Artem Berman, Chief Executive Officer of StarWind Software. “Now small and medium-sized companies have an opportunity to achieve higher performance and absolute data protection.”

About StarWind Software Inc.
StarWind Software is a global leader in storage management and SAN software for small and midsize companies. StarWind’s flagship product is SAN software that turns any industry-standard Windows Server into a fault-tolerant, fail-safe iSCSI SAN. StarWind iSCSI SAN is qualified for use with VMware, Hyper-V, XenServer and Linux and Unix environments. StarWind Software focuses on providing small and midsize companies with affordable, highly availability storage technology which previously was only available in high-end storage hardware. Advanced enterprise-class features in StarWind include Automated HA Storage Node Failover and Failback (High Availability), Replication across a WAN, CDP and Snapshots, Thin Provisioning and Virtual Tape management.

Since 2003, StarWind has pioneered the iSCSI SAN software industry and is the solution of choice for over 30,000 customers worldwide in more than 100 countries and from small and midsize companies to governments and Fortune 1000 companies.

For more information on StarWind Software Inc., visit: www.starwindsoftware.com

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Posted in Virtualization

Tags: 3rd Party Apps Citrix ESX ESXi Hyper-V Linux VMware XenServer

StarWind Webinar – Storage & Hyper-V VM Backup

January 8th, 2012

Webinar Announcement:

What: New StarWind V5.8 – Storage & Hyper-V VM Backup from one vendor!

When: Tuesday, January 10, 4:00 PM GMT / 11:00 AM EST

Where: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/562126034

Details: StarWind iSCSI SAN V5.8 introduces a new powerful backup technology designed specifically for Hyper-V-based environments to provide fast backup and restore for virtual machines.

The key to protection of your virtualization investments is one solution with a rich feature set developed to help you achieve your IT goals easily. It is ONE ultimate answer to all your storage and data managing needs.

StarWind iSCSI SAN 5.8 provides:

Hyper-V Backup Plug-in

- Agentless Architecture

- Backups stored in VHD format

- Global Deduplication

- Single-click Backup

iSCSI Storage

- 100% stability and uptime

- High Availability / Automatic Failover

- Network Centralized Management

- Synchronous Replication

Register now to learn more!
Here is the link for registration:

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/562126034

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Posted in Virtualization

Tags: 3rd Party Apps Hyper-V Microsoft

Veeam Offers Free NFR License for Backup & Replication v6

December 23rd, 2011

Veeam is once again blessing the community with their generous holiday spirit, which of course includes gifts! Veeam recently launched version 6 of their flagship Backup and Replication product which now includes support for Microsoft Hyper-V. Those who are heavily active in the Microsoft and/or VMware community and formally recognized as such, are eligible to register for their free gift from Veeam – NFR licensing for Backup and Replication v6.

I will attest that I’ve been using Veeam Backup & Replication to protect valuable data in my home lab for a few years and I’ve had to rely on it for recovery more than once. I also included it as a backup and disaster recovery replication solution in my VCDX design submission which I successfully defended in February 2010.

Below you’ll find two promotions for redeeming the NFR licenses. First is the Hyper-V promotion for MVPs, MCPs, and MCTSs, followed by the VMware promotion for vEXPERTs, VCPs, VCIs, and registered VMUG members (remember, anyone can be a registered VMUG member, it’s free to sign up, so why not do it today?)

Free NFR license for
Veeam Backup & Replication v6 for Hyper-V
Get this holiday gift from Veeam!

If you are a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP), Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) or a Most Valuable Professional (MVP), you can get a FREE 2-socket NFR* license for Veeam Backup & Replication v6 for your home or work lab.

Register NOW! Get your FREE NFR license from Veeam

*An NFR (Not for Resale) license can only be used for evaluation or demonstration purposes. Read EULA for more details.

Free NFR license for
Veeam Backup & Replication v6 for vSphere
Get this holiday gift from Veeam!

If you are a VMware vExpert, VMware Certified Professional (VCP), VMware Certified Instructor (VCI) or VMware User Group (VMUG) member, you can get a FREE 2-socket NFR* license for Veeam Backup & Replication v6 for your home or work lab.

Register NOW! Get your FREE NFR license from Veeam

*An NFR (Not for Resale) license can only be used for evaluation or demonstration purposes. Read EULA for more details.

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Posted in Virtualization

Tags: 3rd Party Apps ESX ESXi Hyper-V Microsoft VMware vSphere

HotLink Launches Latest Version of HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware

December 14th, 2011

I don’t publish the majority of the press releases which make their way to my inbox but I took a quick look at HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware and what it does is interesting. Watch the video below (feel free to expand to full screen to see the detail) and see how this product is able to pull in various Type 1 hypervisors in a heterogeneous datacenter under the vCenter management umbrella. By now you know VMware isn’t the only player in the hypervisor business. VMware’s competitors have been making their presence known. They remain persistent partly because of their gradual market penetration. And I’ll be the first to admit that the other hypervisors out there are the right fit for some business use cases and requirements. Also, multi vendor policies are not uncommon in large organizations. Whatever the reason, deploying different makes and models of hypervisors in an environment is your business. Managing them with ease is HotLink’s business. Read on.

Press Release:

HotLink Launches Latest Version of HotLink SuperVISOR™ for VMware

Leading enterprises including McAfee and BMC Software adopt HotLink SuperVISOR to seamlessly manage mixed hypervisors inside VMware vCenter console

SUNNYVALE, Calif. – December 15, 2011 – HotLink® Corporation, the market leader in transformation solutions for heterogeneous virtualization management, today announced the newest release of its flagship product, HotLink SuperVISOR™ for VMware. HotLink SuperVISOR is the first and only solution to enable VMware vCenter users to natively manage cross-platform virtual infrastructure spanning Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (KVM). The latest release, HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware 1.2, adds new capabilities focused on enterprise robustness, scalability, configuration and management of multi-hypervisors and workloads.

With its latest release, HotLink customers benefit from an enhanced virtual integration platform that provides total control and performance visibility across all enterprise hypervisors, using the VMware vCenter management console they already have. The new features of HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware 1.2 include:

Enhanced Networking Configuration – Users can now provision and modify virtual switches and network adapters from VMware vCenter and associate these to any enterprise hypervisor —enabling users to manage heterogeneous virtual networking from a single interface.
Expanded Performance Monitoring – The latest release expands the heterogeneous performance statistics and alerts that are gathered and displayed inside the native VMware vCenter performance tab —allowing administrators to quickly identify issues across the mixed hypervisor environment.
Robust Configuration of Virtual Machine Settings – Only HotLink provides the ability to modify the configuration of virtual machine settings such as virtual CPUs and memory assignments natively inside vCenter and apply across all virtual platforms —ensuring the optimum VM configuration regardless of the hypervisor.

“Enterprise IT needs are rapidly evolving as an increasing number of VMware shops are deploying heterogeneous hypervisor environments. Administrators need a single management console that provides a comprehensive view and complete control of all enterprise workloads,” said Lynn LeBlanc, CEO and founder of HotLink. “The latest enhancements to HotLink SuperVISOR extend the VMware vCenter management infrastructure to provide sophisticated and robust management capabilities to Hyper-V, XenServer and KVM – unifying the management of all virtual workloads inside VMware vCenter.”

As virtual infrastructure deployments expand and mature, heterogeneity is being fueled by a combination of economics and maturing of hypervisor alternatives. The most recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure report included, for the first time, both Citrix and Microsoft alongside VMware in the leaders quadrant. Moreover, Hyper-V grew 62 percent last year compared to ESX’s 21 percent growth and Citrix’s 25 percent, according to IDC. While the proliferation of multiple virtual platforms is accelerating, streamlined infrastructure is needed to unify management. That’s exactly what the latest release of HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware addresses.

“McAfee historically was an all VMware shop, but our business needs have changed so that we now have a mix of vSphere, Hyper-V and XenServer. Utilizing HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware across our virtual environment enables us to increase our usage of other hypervisor platforms while unifying management. By deploying multiple hypervisors and standardizing on VMware vCenter as our primary management interface, we expect to reduce our virtualization cost by over 50 percent and admin costs by 65 percent over the next 3 years,” said Mark Tonnesen, CIO of McAfee. “The foundation of our multi-hypervisor environment is built on the HotLink SuperVISOR platform.”

With the new HotLink SuperVISOR technology, enterprises can tier their virtual infrastructure with cost-effective hypervisors and still unify the management, significantly reducing their licensing and operating costs. With HotLink SuperVISOR, customers can realize the benefits of mixed hypervisors while avoiding overly complicated management systems.

“Like many other IT shops, we are investigating the use of multiple hypervisors to cost effectively support development and test activities for our Tier 2 and Tier 3 business applications. We have been very impressed by HotLink’s SuperVISOR technology and the hypervisor interoperability that it enables. We believe that HotLink will enable us to optimize the use of specific hypervisors for individual workloads without compromising our ability to manage our overall virtual environment,” said Mark Settle, CIO of BMC Software.

Pricing and Availability

HotLink SuperVISOR for VMware 1.2 is available now with pricing starting at $25,000. For more information, contact sales@hotlink.com or visit www.hotlink.com.

Supporting Resources

Follow HotLink on:

About HotLink Corporation

Founded in early 2010 by data center software veterans and the founders of FastScale Technology, Inc. (acquired by VMware), HotLink Corporation is on a mission to transform real-world IT with the first true heterogeneous data center system management platform for virtual, cloud and physical computing infrastructure. Early customers include enterprise IT organizations spanning technology, financial services, telecommunications and Internet search. HotLink’s advisory board includes visionary leaders from Informatica, Facebook, E*TRADE, Clorox, Citrix, BMC and Flextronics. HotLink is a privately held, venture capital backed company based in Sunnyvale, California. For more information, visit www.hotlink.com.

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Posted in Virtualization

Tags: 3rd Party Apps Citrix Hyper-V Microsoft VMware XenServer

Say it isn’t so: Hyper-V and XenServer outperform ESX

March 7th, 2009

This isn’t exactly the type of news I like to report but at the same time it can’t be ignored. The February/March 2009 issue of Virtualization Review magazine has an article starting on page 12 where Rick Vanover puts Hyper-V, XenServer, and ESX head to head to head. Some of the conclusions drawn are startling:

“For the first two tests of heavy workloads, VMware underperformed both XenServer and Hyper-V. For the lighter workloads on the third test, the results were almost indistinguishable across the platforms, but ESX had the best results in three of the four categories.”

“After doing these comparisons of ESX to Hyper-V and XenServer, it’s clear that at the hypervisor level, ESX is optimized for a large number of less-intensive workload VMs. For intensive workloads that may not be optimized for memory overcommit apps, Hyper-V and XenServer should definitely be considered-even if that means adding another hypervisor into the data center.”

Rick is saying that both Hyper-V and XenServer deliver better performance for the heavy workloads. ESX is better suited for lighter workloads and actually will handle more of them than Microsoft and Citrix making it the better “scale up” solution. Rick also points out that ESX offers the clear advantage of memory over commit which could not be benchmarked against Hyper-V and XenServer due to memory over commit not being available in the latter two products. For a moment, let’s assume that Rick’s findings are 100% accurate. From an options standpoint, how do you feel about scaling up versus scaling out for the lighter workloads having equal performance across all three platforms? Personally, I’d lean towards higher consolidation ratios, less capital expenditures, less datacenter and utility bill consumption. That’s the ESX option.

I’m concerned that I’m hearing ESX is underperforming against the underdogs. I’m not at all saying Rick’s tests are invalid but I am looking for a response from VMware that is either published, or in the form of ESX4 taking an obvious performance lead once again in benchmark tests. Charging a premium for a lesser performing hypervisor doesn’t sound like the right formula for success.

Update: Slight goof on the title of this blog post. Originally it stated “XenApp” where I meant “XenServer”

Update: Microsoft and VMware have responded to the original article’s performance analysis.

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Posted in Virtualization

Tags: ESX Hyper-V VMware XenServer

Virtualization Manager Mobile (VMM) beta 1 released

January 16th, 2009

Lostcreations, an Austin-based software company which specializes in .NET and Java solutions for the heterogeneous virtualization sector of IT, has released beta version 1 of a product they are calling Virtualization Manager Mobile (VMM).

While the product is new, the concept is not: Remote monitoring and management of your datacenter when you’re at the beach (or wherever remote management is inconvenient using traditional tools like laptops and WiFi). It’s done through a hand held device having a web browser.

Beta 1 has the ability to monitor virtual machine CPU and memory utilization, as well as stop, start, suspend, and reset the VM. The product currently supports VI3, and VMware Server 2. Expect many new features in future versions including support for Hyper-V and XenServer 5 as well as the ability to develop your own plug-ins to extend other hypervisors.

The technology behind the tool includes AJAX and the Google Web Toolkit and the application back end installs on Windows, Linux, and OS X. Lostcreations even provides a live demo to see the tool in action first hand!

After a decade of talking about it, we’re finally getting there!

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Posted in Virtualization

Tags: 3rd Party Apps Hyper-V VMware XenServer

Guest blog entry: VMotion performance

January 5th, 2009

Good afternoon VMware virtualization enthusiasts and Hyper-V users whom Microsoft has condoned on your behalf that you don’t have a need for hot migration if you have an intern and $50,000 cash.

Simon Long has shared with us this fantastic article he wrote regarding VMotion performance. More specifically, fine tuning concurrent VMotions allowed by vCenter. This one is going in my document repository and tweaks ‘n’ tricks collection. Thank you Simon and everyone please remember that virtualization is not best enjoyed in moderation!

Simon can be reached via email at contact (at) simonlong.co.uk as well as @SimonLong_ on Twitter.

I’ll set the scene a little….

I’m working late, I’ve just installed Update Manager and I‘m going to run my first updates. Like all new systems, I’m not always confident so I decided “Out of hours” would be the best time to try.

I hit “Remediate” on my first Host then sat back, cup of tea in hand and watch to see what happens….The Host’s VM’s were slowly migrated off 2 at a time onto other Hosts.

“It’s gonna be a long night” I thought to myself. So whilst I was going through my Hosts one at time, I also fired up Google and tried to find out if there was anyway I could speed up the VMotion process. There didn’t seem to be any article or blog posts (that I could find) about improving VMotion Performance so I created a new Servicedesk Job for myself to investigate this further.

3 months later whilst at a product review at VMware UK, I was chatting to their Inside Systems Engineer, Chris Dye, and I asked him if there was a way of increasing the amount of simultaneous VMotions from 2 to something more. He was unsure, so did a little digging and managed to find a little info that might be helpful and fired it across for me to test.

After a few hours of basic testing over the quiet Christmas period, I was able to increase the amount of simultaneous VMotions…Happy Days!!

But after some further testing it seemed as though the amount of simultaneous VMotions is actually set per Host. This means if I set my vCenter server to allow 6 VMotions, I then place 2 Hosts into maintenance mode at the same time, there would actually be 12 VMotions running simultaneously. This is certainly something you should consider when deciding how many VMotions you would like running at once.

Here are the steps to increase the amount of Simultaneous VMotion Migrations per Host.

1. RDP to your vCenter Server.
2. Locate the vpdx.cfg (Default location “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter”)
3. Make a Backup of the vpxd.cfg before making any changes
4. Edit the file in using WordPad and insert the following lines between the <vpdx></vpdx> tags;

5. Now you need to decide what value to give “maxCostPerHost”.

A Cold Migration has a cost of 1 and a Hot Migration aka VMotion has a cost of 4. I first set mine to 12 as I wanted to see if it would now allow 3 VMotions at once, I now permanently have mine set to 24 which gives me 6 simultaneous VMotions per Host (6×4 = 24).

I am unsure on the maximum value that you can use here, the largest I tested was 24.

6. Save your changes and exit WordPad.
7. Restart “VMware VirtualCenter Server” Service to apply the changes.

Now I know how to change the amount of simultaneous VMotions per Host, I decided to run some tests to see if it actually made any difference to the overall VMotion Performance.

I had 2 Host’s with 16 almost identical VM’s. I created a job to Migrate my 16 VM’s from Host 1 to Host 2.

Both Hosts VMotion vmnic was a single 1Gbit nic connected to a CISCO Switch which also has other network traffic on it.

The Network Performance graph above was recorded during my testing and is displaying the “Network Data Transmit” measurement on the VMotion vmnic. The 3 sections highlighted represent the following;

Section 1 – 16 VM’s VMotioned from Host 1 to Host 2 using a maximum of 6 simultaneous VMotions.
Time taken = 3.30

Section 2 – This was not a test, I was simply just migrating the VM’s back onto the Host for the 2nd test (Section 3).

Section 3 – 16 VM’s VMotioned from Host 1 to Host 2 using a maximum of 2 simultaneous VMotions.
Time taken = 6.36

Time Different = 3.06
3 Mins!! I wasn’t expecting it to be that much. Imagine if you had a 50 Host cluster…how much time would it save you?
I tried the same test again but only migrating 6 VM’s instead of 16.

Migrating off 6 VM’s with only 2 simultaneous VMotions allowed.
Time taken = 2.24

Migrating off 6 VM’s with 6 simultaneous VMotions allowed.
Time taken = 1.54

Time Different = 30secs

It’s still an improvement all be it not so big.

Now don’t get me wrong, these tests are hardly scientific and would never have been deemed as completely fair test but I think you get the general idea of what I was trying to get at.

I’m hoping to explore VMotion Performance further by looking at maybe using multiple physical nics for VMotion and Teaming them using EtherChannel or maybe even using 10Gbit Ethernet. Right now I don’t have the spare Hardware to do that but this is definitely something I will try when the opportunity arises.