Virtualization Redemption?
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@hubtechagain said:
@scottalanmiller They will more than likely just be two individual hosts. why would I change that up now?
If you wanted HA. Now that you are leaving the ESXi world, the big features like vMotion and High Availability (at the hypervisor level) are free. It's a whole new world of opportunity.
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@hubtechagain said:
considering we were willing to lose a day of data to our DR site.... this will replicate much more often, so this is already better than what i've been thinking.
But is it the best application of the resources at hand? Why do "good enough" when "better" is also an option?
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@dafyre said:
@scottalanmiller If he could get it at 30 seconds, that would be acceptable! Especially in a full DR scenario, lol.
Thirty seconds instead of zero isn't big, but it is just one piece of the puzzle. Going to "users will never know" is nice.
Going from "a little data loss" to zero is bigger.
Going from "Crash consistent" to "fully consistent is bigger still."
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@hubtechagain said:
WTF is starwind?! ha
Starwind is the leader in storage replication technology for both HyperV (all scales) and ESXi (below three nodes). They are free and the only major player in this particular space. @KOOLER
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@dafyre said:
However, if your servers are now standalone, and you are happy with that... It may not be worth rocking the boat...
Thoughts, @scottalanmiller ?
Can go either way. Worth talking to the customer, though. This is a BIG move forward that they are getting for "free", other than Hub's time (which he presumably wants to sell more of) , by moving off of VMware. This is not just a chance for him to expand his value to the customers, but a chance for him to showcase a leap forward for them, rather than an incremental advance.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Given the costs and the specific needs, I feel like XenServer and StorageCraft might be the most cost effective. All you have to license is the StorageCraft.
Yes, StorageCraft would be a cost effective solution here.
We support XenServer as well as ESXi (including free) and Hyper-V as well as several other hypervisor platforms. So you have a number of choices how you deploy your virtual environment because we're not tied to a specific host API to get the job done. StorageCraft uses an agent on each Windows or Linux VM to create a disk image and store it on your storage (again, you can choose what storage to use). You can license StorageCraft per agent and most of the admin tools (e.g. centralized management and monitoring, etc.) are free. Feel free to download a trial from our website, and let me know if you want someone to quote prices for you.
As an aside, if you did decide to switch from VMware ESXi to Hyper-V or XenServer at some point in the future it would be extremely easy to V2V those VMs using StorageCraft. In addition, your backup history on ESXi would continue to be used as part of the ongoing backup chain on the new server. We really do make it easy to recover anywhere!
Cheers
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@hubtechagain said:
So, do i stick with ESX and get essentials for 666 bucks, and if so what backup do i use?
Do i switch do xen for the cost of me doing the work? if so what backup solution do i use?
Do i switch to Hyper-V 08r2? what backup solution do i use?Thanks for everything guys!
You can use StorageCraft with each of these solutions. Which means my response to your question becomes, "Which of these hypervisors fits your budget and offers you the most features you'll use?" If you like one of these or are more familiar with one over the others then I would go with that one. Hypervisor features are becoming more standardized across all vendors. When one comes out with a good idea the others tend to come up with their own version of the same feature soon after. At that point it just becomes a matter of which UI you know best.
Cheers!
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Well, were i to "network raid" my two hosts....I would not have enough space to handle the workload. Pretty sure that separate hosts is the way we need to stay at this client specifically. @Steven sadly you were a bit slow to the game and I think that the boys have me figured out
I'm currently using thinware for my local backups. not sure if it works with HyperV or if i'll have to find another local storage backup option to push to the NAS. -
@hubtechagain said:
Well, were i to "network raid" my two hosts....I would not have enough space to handle the workload.
So no way to do replication between the two local hosts at all? You are going to have an offsite failover box but not a local one? That seems like a bad idea. That's doing all of your planning for the least likely scenario (site destruction) and avoiding the planning for the more likely one (node failure.)
Am I missing something?
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No. We live in hurricane ally. an all out local outage is more likely 4 months of the year than a single server outage
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@hubtechagain said:
not sure if it works with HyperV or if i'll have to find another local storage backup option to push to the NAS.
Is this how you are handling local failover? If the one node dies, you spin VMs up off of the NAS, using the NAS as temporary primarily storage?
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@hubtechagain said:
No. We live in hurricane ally. an all out local outage is more likely 4 months of the year than a single server outage
Oh okay, I guess that makes sense.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller Would StorageCraft in this case basically just sync his VM's from one client to another at a given point in time? I think that is real goal here. If the main site dies, Hub wants to connect to the VM host in the remote DC and just turn on the VMs there so they company is back on line.
Yes, it would be an incremental backup from one site to the other. As well as taking normal "on site" backups. It's a full backup utility.
That's correct. This design is especially useful as a warm failover when replicating between sites rather than replication between two hosts at the same site. As Scott points out, Hyper-V will replicate between hosts. VMware does this with vMotion as well. These provide native replication between two hosts on the same hypervisor platform.
Replicated backup image files become more useful when you:
A) you want to lower costs. For example, your hypervisor of choice charges for this feature.
B) you want to reach back into the past. For example, you get a virus and want the far side to use a virtual disk based on a point in time prior to the infection.
C) you have limited resources at the offsite. For example, your offsite is primarily a storage repository but you have some compute resources available. Those resources can be used as a temporary failover for onsite systems by implementing a backup image in the offsite storage. Public cloud services are a good example of this where you use offsite mostly for storage and only spin up a VM when needed. -
using the hyper v replication, how do the VMs behave? they're offline, replicating, then boom, tree crashes through building and smokes our server rack. i just remote into the DR server and spin em up?
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@scottalanmiller said:
Paging @Steven
Yep... was doing a webinar with Redmond Channel Partners at the time so I responded as soon as I could.
Thanks for the ping!
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@hubtechagain said:
using the hyper v replication, how do the VMs behave? they're offline, replicating, then boom, tree crashes through building and smokes our server rack. i just remote into the DR server and spin em up?
Basically, yes.
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@hubtechagain said:
I'm currently using thinware for my local backups. not sure if it works with HyperV or if i'll have to find another local storage backup option to push to the NAS.
Veeam free could handle this. since you can just do a new full backup nightly or something.
Setup the powershell script and schedule it with task manager.
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@hubtechagain said:
Well, were i to "network raid" my two hosts....I would not have enough space to handle the workload. Pretty sure that separate hosts is the way we need to stay at this client specifically. @Steven sadly you were a bit slow to the game and I think that the boys have me figured out
I'm currently using thinware for my local backups. not sure if it works with HyperV or if i'll have to find another local storage backup option to push to the NAS.I hear ya. Thanks for letting me join (late) and good luck!
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@hubtechagain said:
using the hyper v replication, how do the VMs behave? they're offline, replicating, then boom, tree crashes through building and smokes our server rack. i just remote into the DR server and spin em up?
Yup, that basically sums it up. It's basically a "zero to five minute copy" sitting over at the other site.
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@hubtechagain said:
using the hyper v replication, how do the VMs behave? they're offline, replicating, then boom, tree crashes through building and smokes our server rack. i just remote into the DR server and spin em up?
As I understand it, writes to one VM are also sent to the replica. The data sent happens at set intervals (e.g. 30s, 5min, and 15min). This creates redundant VMs on the two hosts with the replica slightly behind the source. When a tree crashes through the roof and craters one VM then the other simply keeps running (either it's the source and the target no longer receives updates, or it's the target and the host doesn't care).
