Citrix Summit is a major event for Citrix partners to learn the best new technology products for application delivery infrastructure solutions. The event was a few weeks ago, and it is worth noting that in the keynote presentation, delivered by Mark Templeton, President and CEO, and Peter Blum, Senior Systems Engineering Manager, they demonstrated Marathon’s everRun VM Level 3 protecting XenApp. What the audience saw was how everRun provided continuous availability for XenApp – even when they unplugged one of the servers.

Did anyone have a chance to see this demo live? What did you think?

Every day, companies around the world rely on the features of Microsoft Exchange for their business-critical applications like email, calendaring, contacts, mobile support, web-based information accessing and data storage support. While we’ve discussed the importance of maintaining Microsoft Exchange high availability and steps to simpler Exchange HA, we thought this would be a good opportunity to share a case study from one of our customers.

Connecting Employees, Vendors and Customers Without Interruption

A large U.S. furniture retailer was becoming increasingly dependent on Microsoft Exchange 2003 for internal communication and collaboration, and for communication with both vendors and customers. Since the retailers primary revenue-generating activities relied on e-mail, downtime would have resulted in serious consequences. As a result, Exchange protection became a requirement and top priority for senior leaders.

everRun –An Alternative to Clustering

The IT staff had previous experience with traditional clustering and was looking for an easier, more robust solution. They selected everRun and implemented a solution using a pair of IBM servers with local boot disks and a fibre channel SAN for the datastore. Currently, the system supports close to 1200 users.

No Exchange Failures = Increased Competitive Advantage

In over a year of operation, they have not experienced a single unplanned disruption of their Exchange system. In turn, this has allowed them to keep their revenue-generating activities operating at full speed. As a result, they are currently looking at adding the everRun SplitSite option to allow geographical separation of their systems for additional protection.

Do you have a story when protecting Exchange would have been a better option than what resulted? How did it affect you or your company?

Yesterday, Matt Fairbanks, VP Product Marketing, Citrix, and Jerry Melnick, CTO, Marathon, presented the webinar “Virtualizing Exchange – The Cold, Hard Numbers on Why Citrix XenServer + everRun VM is the Best Platform.” Below are a few of the questions asked from participants with Jerry’s response to each:

Q: What happens in a case of a split brain scenario?

Jerry: In our SplitSite products, we have what we call a quorum services capability – it’s actually an additional component that’s added on to manage split brain and arbitrate when you lose all connections between the two machines.

Q: How long does it generally take to set up XenServer with everRun VM to create this kind of a solution?

Jerry: Citrix people have always mentioned “Ten minutes to Xen” which is a pretty good rule of thumb. We say it’s another ten minutes to add the Marathon software. It’s a simple script that gets run on each host, and then you’re off and ready to protect the machines. The actual protection process itself is really a matter of a minute. The simplicity and ease have never been seen before in this industry with this class of availability solution.

Q: In field of limitations and customers that have deployed this kind of technology, are there any things you would council people to consider to set up XenServer and everRun in the most highly available and robust way?

Jerry: With our system, we provide best practice guidelines for configuring networks availability, etc. One of the beauties of our technology – working in conjunction with XenServer – is that once everything is installed and running, we put everything into an active validation mode so that we know components are configured properly. If something is misconfigured or isn’t running redundantly, you’re going to see the status and receive a warning. A key benefit of this system is you will know how to fix it before there are any problems.

There are many cases in availability systems where you have simple failover technologies: you take an error, you failover, you get to that resource, and then you find out the network or disk isn’t working because it wasn’t configured properly. By having this active validation capability and the report out, the status is being monitored in a simple and reliable fashion – you know when you’re redundant and how you’re going to manage failures.

Thanks to everyone that attended. For those that didn’t have the chance to attend or ask questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments section and we will do our best to answer them.

For those of you that may have forgot to put it on your calendars, Marathon and Citrix are holding a webinar today to showcase the benefits of virtualizing Microsoft Exchange servers. Event attendees will learn:

The webinar will begin promptly at 11:30 a.m. EDT, so if you haven’t yet registered you can do so here.

For those that can’t attend, we will be posting the Q&A following the event.

A couple of weeks ago Gartner released their “Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009.” Each technology is defined as, “one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years.” The technologies listed have been available for quite some time – many of which were present on last year’s list – but one that continues to move up in rank is virtualization.

Considering the state of the economy, we anticipate this to be an area that will continue to flourish over the next 12-24 months as virtualization technology becomes feasible for businesses of all sizes. We’ve discussed the economical (and environmental) benefits of virtualization in recent posts found here and here.

So what do you think? Do you agree that virtualization is the #1 strategic technology for 2009?

As we noted in our last post, Exchange High Availability has become increasingly important to businesses of all sizes. To help you get started, we’ve put together these five tips, which are easily-digestible pieces from our “Protecting Microsoft Exchange in Physical and Virtual Environments” white paper.

STEP ONE – PROTECT AGAINST SERVER FAILURES WITH QUALITY HARDWARE AND COMPONENT REDUNDANCY

Server core components include power supplies, fans, memory, CPUs and main logic boards. Purchasing robust, name brand servers, performing recommended preventative maintenance, and monitoring server errors for signs of future problems can all help reduce the chances of Exchange downtime due to catastrophic server failure.

Downtime caused by server component failures can be significantly reduced by adding redundancy at the component level. Examples are: redundant power and cooling, ECC memory, with the ability to correct single-bit memory errors, and combining Ethernet cards with RAID.

STEP TWO – GET RID OF STORAGE FAILURES WITH STORAGE DEVICE REDUNDANCY AND RAID

Storage protection relies on device redundancy combined with RAID storage algorithms to protect data access and data integrity from hardware failures. There are distinct issues for both local disk storage and for shared, network storage.

For local storage, it is quite easy to add extra disks configured with RAID protection. A second disk controller is also required if you want to protect against controller failures.

Access to shared storage relies on either a fibre channel or Ethernet storage network. To assure uninterrupted access to shared storage, these networks must be designed to eliminate all single points of failure. This requires redundancy of network paths, network switches, and network connections to each storage array.

STEP THREE – PREVENT NETWORK FAILURES WITH REDUNDANT NETWORK PATHS, SWITCHES AND ROUTERS

The network infrastructure itself must be fault-tolerant, consisting of redundant network paths, switches, routers and other network elements. Server connections can also be duplicated to eliminate failovers caused by the failure of a single server or network component. Take care to ensure that the physical network hardware does not share common components. For example, dual-ported network cards share common hardware logic, and a single card failure can disable both ports. Full redundancy requires either two separate adapters or the combination of a built-in network port along with a separate network adapter.

STEP FOUR – FORGET SITE FAILURES WITH DATA REPLICATION TO ANOTHER SITE

Site failures can range from an air conditioning failure or a leaking roof that affects a single building, a power failure that affects a limited local area, or a major hurricane that affects a large geographic area. Site disruptions can last anywhere from a few hours to days or even weeks.

There are two methods for dealing with Site Disasters. One method is to tightly couple redundant servers across high speed/low latency links, to provide zero data-loss and zero downtime. The other method is to loosely couple redundant servers over medium speed/higher latency/greater distance lines, to provide a disaster recovery (DR) capability where a remote server can be restarted with a copy of the application database, which only misses the last few updates. In the latter case, asynchronous data replication is used to keep a backup copy of the data.

Data replication is combined with error detection and failover tools to help get a disaster recovery site up and running in minutes or hours, rather than days.

STEP FIVE – CONSIDER VIRTUALIZING EXCHANGE FOR BETTER HIGH AVILABILITY

The latest server virtualization technologies, while not required for protecting Exchange, do offer some unique benefits that can make Exchange protection both easier and more effective. Virtualization makes it very easy to set up evaluation test and development environments without the need for additional, dedicated hardware. Virtualization also allows resources to be adjusted dynamically to accommodate growth or peak loads.

To help you make the business case for virtualization Exchange, we’re producing a live webinar with Citrix on November 11th: Virtualizing Exchange - The Cold, Hard Numbers on Why Citrix XenServer + everRun VM is the Best Platform. Register for the webinar here.

For most organizations, email is single-handedly the most important tool for accomplishing business objectives. Without access to email, companies are at an immediate disadvantage in today’s “I want it now” marketplace. For example, let’s look at the impact email downtime has on productivity: Assuming that your employees are 25% less productive when email is unavailable, and their annual salary is $60,000, then every hour of downtime for an organization of 500 people results in more than $7,200 in lost employee productivity. Can your organization bare a $7,200/hour loss? In today’s economy? Probably Definitely not.

Avoiding the aforementioned consequence is an option, but in order to do so you need to guarantee continuous availability for your organizations email server. According to Paul Rubens at ServerWatch, 2007 forecasts from Gartner revealed that Microsoft Exchange 2007 will own 70% of the email market share by 2010. Now, whether Microsoft will actually return those results, it’s still too early to tell. However, as more and more companies rely on Exchange servers to run business functions, all potential causes of unplanned downtime need to be identified and eliminated.

Over the next month, we will be providing you with some recommendations on how to improve Exchange high availability through planned and unplanned downtime – starting with a webinar on November 11 titled “Virtualizing Exchange – The Cold, Hard Numbers on Why Citrix XenServer and everRun VM is the Best Platform.” For this webinar, Jerry Melnick, Marathon CTO, and Matt Fairbanks, VP of Product Marketing for Citrix Virtualization and Management Division, will team up to discuss how the latest server virtualization technologies keep users continuously connected to Microsoft Exchange servers in the easiest and most effective manner. We encourage you to register online for the webinar if you haven’t already.

Is there anything in particular related to protecting your Exchange severs you would like us to address in the next few weeks? Leave us a comment below and we will be sure to put it on our radar.

As a result of economic turbulence, companies of all sizes continue to explore virtualization as an option for shedding costs. With the growing number of virtualization options available, it’s important not to let your organization fall victim to virtualization buzzwords. Not all vendors offer the benefits of virtualization, yet many claim they do.

With that being said, when deciding which solution to implement within your organization, IT decision makers should be prepared with an arsenal of questions to ask each provider – doing so will eliminate the typical “fluff” vendors use to sell their supposed virtualization solutions. Having all your questions answered will ensure that you get the most appropriate and highest quality solution for the applications you wish to protect. The following is a list of questions that might assist IT professionals in making their virtualization-related decisions, and some other considerations we offer:

These are just a few examples that should help get the conversation going. Has anyone deployed a virtual environment that wasn’t the right fit? What were the repercussions and what needed to be done to correct it?

If anyone has any questions they wish they had asked prior to purchasing, please leave them in the comments below and we will be sure to add them to the list.