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Blog

When planning your VM workloads, you should be aware of what level of availability each server will need. By splitting the amount of users across multiple VM’s you can provide a level of availability to each set of users based upon your SLA with each business unit in your company. Looking back to the availability pyramid you can choose which level of availability for each mailbox server is needed. For example if you have an executive group that needs to be up with a 24/7 uptime and only limited downtime then level 3 should be your selection on a separate mailbox server. If all of your business units require the same level of availability and have the same SLA in place then you will split your mailbox servers according to usage. Using the chart from section one we can split the users based upon the type of user. For example if you have 1,000 heavy users we would assign 2 vCPU’s to the virtual machine. Always follow Microsoft best practices when deploying the amount of users per core or vCPU.

If we look at Figure 1 we can see that that we have 4 active VM’s spread across two servers with 2 vCPU’s assigned to each. Looking at the example chart above and using figure one we can see that this design example would support 4,000 “Heavy users”. We achieve this by allowing our storage groups on each mailbox VM to support 1,000 “Heavy” users.

Let’s take a look at a basic design with 3 separate types of users spread across 4 servers. We have an executive mailbox store, a mid-management store, and a general user store. In looking over what each teams HA requirement is we have come to the following, the executive team needs 24/7 up time with no downtime except for a maintenance window once a month. The mid-management team can handle some downtime, but only a few minutes each week. The general users have no HA requirement they can be down for an hour a week if needed. So how do we decided what level of availability we would like to use, it’s easy we simply look at the application availability pyramid and we put the appropriate mailbox store at each level:

By using this simple plan you can simplify you’re HA strategy for Exchange. By distributing the mailbox stores across multiple servers on the same hardware you can save rack space as well as provide individual levels of availability based upon different business unit needs.

We had a lot of great questions during the Q & A session of our January webinar with one of our customers. We’ve posted the questions and responses here on our blog for everyone’s benefit.

Questions for The Sullivan Group:

Q: Which everRun product are they running? everRun HA or FT?
A: everRun VM

Q: How did you migrate your VMware VMs to XenServer?
A: We used a V2V software migration tool from Visioncore that worked really well.

Q: What was the procedure when bringing back up one of the servers when the RAID card failed. How easy was it?
A: It couldn’t have been easier. Once we repaired the failed component, everRun identified it and put it back into use. everRun used a mirror copy to bring the two systems back in complete synchronization. This all happened without our intervention and without impacting our users.

Q: Was a short implementation time a demand from The Sullivan Group, and what was the expectations before the implementation?
A: Short implementation time wasn’t a hard requirement. We expected the implementation to take a couple of weeks and were pleasantly surprised when we had it all up and running in a little less than a week.

Questions for Marathon:

Q: Is there a special license for SQL? Or any other special considerations?
A: Special licensing for the applications you protect is not required. You should refer to the SQL license agreement or the agreement for the application on the VM that you are protecting. With everRun, only one instance of the application is running at any one time.

Q: Is this active active or active passive?
A: We refer to it as ‘active/ready’. The secondary VM is in a paused state, however disk and network I/O are being processed. This allows everRun to deliver fault tolerance at the component level, while immediately starting the paused VM fully in the event of a full host failure on the primary side.

Q: Do you have to install everRun prior to your application, so if I already have an application installed would I need to rebuild the production server? IF so does this change the install time and impact?
A: Assuming you have a VM set up on a host, the application can be installed before or after the VM is protected with everRun. The protection process does require the VM to be shutdown prior to beginning the protect process, however the process takes about 2 minutes to complete after which time the VM can be restarted.

Q: How does everRun handle Software or OS hangs?
A: everRun does not monitor applications.

Q: In your opinion what is the strongest difference between this and MS Clustering?
A: MS Clustering can be a nice fit, especially with applications such as SQL Server. One of the requirements for MSCS is shared storage, or a SAN. This requirement can push the cost out of reach for many small and midsized businesses. everRun does not require shared storage and can utilize any type of storage the customer may have or intend to purchase. In addition, everRun provides fault tolerance and not just failover restart. This helps to minimize interruptions typically caused by failed devices.

Q: Does everRun VM support Windows x64 architecture on VM?
A: Yes, everRun and XenServer support 64-bit hardware and software.

Q: Can VM run Windows 2008 x64? Or Windows 2003 x64?
A: Citrix XenServer supports VMs running Windows 2008 64-bit and Windows 2003 64-bit. Currently everRun VM can protect VM’s running Windows Server 2003, 32-bit and 64-bit. Our next release planned for calendar Q2 09 will support Windows Server 2008 32-bit and 64-bit VM’s.

Q: How much overhead do you have when you protect a VM?
A: When protecting a VM you are able to define how much of a particular resource is to be utilized and reserved. This helps to reduce the amount of resources required for protecting VM’s. Performance overhead can vary depending on if it is I/O heavy, CPU heavy, what the application is, etc. Typically however performance overhead is not impactful.

Q: Is everRun tied to a VM on a particular physical XenServer, what would happen if you used XenServer technology to move to another physical server?
A: Once a VM is protected with everRun, it is hard-configured to two physical hosts. everRun allows online migration of the active VM between these two hosts without interruption. To move one or both VM’s in the protected pair to a different host would require it to be unprotected, migrated if necessary, and protected again with the new host.

Q: Please speak about XenServer integration, process for failover to DR site?
A: everRun has a tight integration with XenServer. everRun is installed on top of XenServer and is completely compatible and able to protect Windows VMs created in XenCenter. During the protection process, everRun takes the chosen VM and clones it to the designate secondary host. This creates a complete and identical VM on the secondary host. everRun maintains these two VM synchronously so that they are always identical. everRun’s unique architecture exposes these two mirrored VM’s as a single VM; there is no need to install, manage, or update both sides, only the one single instance of the OS/application. Should the entire ‘primary’ host fail, the ‘secondary’ host will immediately start the cloned VM. It comes up with the same IP address, hostname, and MAC address of the primary so that there are no client-side, DNS, Active Directory, or other infrastructure changes required.

Q: Will everRun run on x64?
A: Yes, it requires 64-bit servers.

Q: I assume the servers must match i.e. memory, HD space and memory as well as other array controllers and type of arrays?
A: The only requirement for similarities within the servers is same family of processors. everRun can mirror storage between dissimilar storage types and vendors, allowing lower-cost storage to be deployed on the ‘secondary’ host.

Q: Is everRun for virtual servers XenServer specific, or does it work with Hyper-V, Virtual Iron, etc.?
A: Today everRun is developed for XenServer. In January we announced a development and marketing agreement with Microsoft, we will be developing an everRun product for Hyper-V as well.

Q: What if the server is up but a single app on the server fails? Also, how do you detect the app failed?
A: everRun does not monitor applications. However if by ‘single app’ you mean a single VM, everRun does protect at the individual VM level. If a VM fails yet the host and other VM’s remain alive, everRun can restart the VM on the secondary host.

Q: Do you have to purchase redundant licenses for the applications that you have replication as Virtual Machines across two physical servers? For example, do you have to purchase double the Exchange licenses to do it or just the licenses as if you had a single server?
A: You would need to refer to the license agreement for each application. With everRun, the application is running as a single instance and many vendors don’t require two licenses, but this varies between vendors.

Q: Can you have full fault tolerance on XenApp servers between 2 datacenters, where users would not be disconnected from their session if a failover occurred?
A: everRun can certainly protect XenApp as it can protect any Windows application. A number of customers are using everRun to protect XenApp today. The ability to separate between data centers (there are latency requirements due the synchronous nature of everRun) will be available in Q2. To prevent session disconnects will require Level 3 protection, or full System-Level Fault Tolerance, which will also be available for everRun VM in Q2.

Q: Can the VM servers be in different data centers across a WAN behind firewalls?
A: The ability to separate servers geographically will be available in Q2.

Q: Are there general guidelines on the number of VM's that can be protected between two host machines? I'm thinking of SQL Server systems hosting highly transactional databases.
A: The answer to this is dependent on the applications running within the VM’s, hardware, and activity within them, so providing a set number of VM’s would not be practical. Please contact Marathon if you would like to discuss your environment to better understand what VM limits may be suitable.

Q: How can you use the USB interface, for example when software requires a dongle?
A: everRun does not redirect the USB interface to a protected VM.

While most companies using Microsoft Exchange still use Exchange 2003, Exchange 2007 provides a new, more flexible architecture that provides real benefits worth looking at. This new architecture is based on server roles. All services and features are organized around five distinct server roles: Mailbox, Client Access, Hub Transport, Unified Messaging and Edge Transport. The big advantage to this approach is that you only have to deploy the roles that are needed and multiple copies of a role can be deployed for enhanced availability, DR and performance.

When Exchange 2007 is run in a virtual server environment each role can be implemented as a separate virtual machine. Individual services can be easily matched to resource requirements by selecting the number and location of the virtual machines implementing each service to be started. The number, location and configuration of these virtual machines can be dynamically adjusted as usage requirements change over time. Infrastructure components that support the Exchange environment, including Active Directory, DNS and DHCP that have traditionally required separate servers and distinct availability solutions, can now be implemented as virtual machines in a common resource pool and leverage the common availability solution that is used to address the entire virtualization environment.

Virtualization also makes disaster recovery easier to implement, more effective and less costly. Virtual machines separate the software configuration from the underlying hardware. This provides total flexibility in the hardware required for the disaster site. One set of hardware can provide disaster backup for multiple applications and cost effective configurations can be chosen strictly based on their disaster recovery role. Software configurations change over time and changes must be duplicated at the disaster site to ensure proper operation. This can be extremely time consuming and error prone in a physical environment. In a virtual environment, the configuration is contained within the virtual machine definition file. Simply copying this file to the disaster site is all that is needed to maintain configuration compatibility.

So how many of you have made the important step to moving to Exchange 2007? If you haven’t deployed 2007 yet, are you planning to? We would love to hear from you. If you have a minute, please take the poll to the left and tell us your plans. If you deployed it, are you taking advantage of the virtualization benefits? Leave us a comment and share your thoughts.

This video was created by the Citrix UK and Marathon UK team’s to help IT understand how XenServer and everRun provide a better way to run business-critical and mission-critical applications in virtual environments. After watching the video, feel free to leave us any other questions you might have.

As many of you know, one of the key components of everRun VM is the ability to dial up or dial down the level of availability needed to protect business-critical applications. With buzz surrounding the release of Citrix’ XenServer 5, we have been approached with questions like “what should I use to protect my low-priority applications” and “how do I know when something should or shouldn’t be protected with the lockstep option?” To help explain the three levels of availability and when they would be used, we’ve put together these tips:

LEVEL 1: BASIC FAILOVER WITH XENSERVER HA
The first level of availability, basic failover and recovery, is appropriate for applications where recovery is not absolutely critical, and where manual intervention, while not desirable, is acceptable. These may include infrastructure applications or dev and test systems.
XenServer HA provides:

LEVEL 2: COMPONENT-LEVEL FAULT TOLERANCE WITH everRun VM
For applications with business-critical roles, everRun VM provides component-level fault tolerance: the ability to withstand the loss of an individual network or storage component without interruption or downtime.
The attributes of Level-2 availability include:

LEVEL 3: SYSTEM-LEVEL FAULT TOLERANCE WITH everRun VM AND LOCKSTEP OPTION
For the most mission-critical systems, Marathon everRun VM with Lockstep Option provides system-level fault tolerance, with continuous availability in the face of component or system-wide failures. Level 3 will be available in 2009 and offers protection for systems that cannot experience any downtime and must maintain transaction state at all costs. everRun VM with Lockstep Option offers all of the benefits of everRun VM (Level 2), together with:

For more information on the different levels of availability please visit here.

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.

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.

“When we describe everRun VM to customers and prospects, the common reaction is ‘it’s too good to be true’” – Steve Keilen, VP of Marketing for Marathon Technologies

Today we made a Single Host Trial Edition of everRun VM available for prospects to download and test out. The trial edition allows users to experience everRun VM benefits – automated setup, configuration and management, intuitive interface and reliable VM protection – all within a matter of minutes.

By experiencing the simple “Click to Protect” power of everRun VM customers can:
• See how easy it is to protect a virtual machine in two minutes or less
• Put the protected VM through failure scenarios (including network and disk failures)
• Use online migration to move a running protected VM to another XenServer host

If you or your organization is in the market for fault-tolerant, high availability virtual server software, we encourage you to download the everRun VM Single Host Trial Edition. It comes with everything you need to get started, including an evaluation copy of XenServer Enterprise Edition. Feel free to leave a comment or contact us with any questions you may have.

A research report by IDC’s virtualization guru, John Humphreys, The Future of Virtualization: Leveraging Mobility to Move Beyond Consolidation highlights the fact that the automatic restart used by most high availability solutions for virtualization fails to deliver what most customers really want and need. Here is what John has to say:

“To address unplanned downtime today virtualization companies are providing an automatic restart capability if the hypervisor or host go down for whatever reason. While this is a good start to trying to combat the lost revenue associated with unplanned outages, ultimately knowing what is happening at the hypervisor and hardware layers fails to deliver customers what they most want — application-level awareness and action. In this way, current HA solutions in the virtualization market are "blind from the waist up." That is, they do not know what is happening inside the virtual machine. They do not know if the operating system or application has stopped working, and that is ultimately what IT professionals charged with delivering application services most care to know.”

If you would like to learn more about high availability for virtualization, how to get application-level awareness and what that can buy you, we encourage you to join the webinar Thursday, June 26 at 11:30 EST. with John Humphreys (IDC), Simon Crosby (Citrix) and Jerry Melnick (Marathon).

For more information or to register visit here.

As demand rises for IT managers and C-level executives to embrace virtualization, we thought it would be worthwhile to share our insights into adopting server virtualization. The tips below are designed to help companies determine if server virtualization is right for them and how they should prepare to ensure a successful initial implementation.

Tip #1 – Make the business case for server virtualization

Before implementing server virtualization, IT executives should assess whether the technology will provide a reasonable return on investment. They should first take a look at how they are using servers today and ask themselves:

• Do they have common applications running on a number of different servers?
• Do they have enough servers that could and should be consolidated? Is the number of applications increasing and the capacity required for the applications continuing to expand?
• Do they expect the number of servers they have to buy each year to increase? If so, by how much?
• Is the business planning to undertake other large-scale technology implementations, and if so, how will this fit with a possible virtualization development?

In short, the IT department has to make a strong business case and justify the virtualization investment to ensure executive management support. To help conduct a quick assessment, ROI calculators are available from VMware and Marathon. Marathon also has a webinar available with John Humphreys, Program Vice President, Virtualization Software for IDC, “Making the Business Case for Server Virtualization,” in which John provides essential guidance in making your business case.

Tip #2 – Consider the license and support implications

IT managers need investigate what, if any, impact virtualization will have on their application licenses and support. Depending on the application, the original licensing terms and conditions may no longer apply after the applications have been migrated to the virtualized environment. In addition, it may be that the providers of some of the software applications do not support virtualization systems, and are unwilling to offer technical support for the applications after the migration to a virtualized environment.

Tip #3 – Afford to spend the time to plan

As any IT professional knows, implementing a new system requires dedicated resources, budget and time. Industry experts have estimated that the planning stage constitutes 90% of a virtualization implementation project. The actual migration is relatively simple to undertake provided that the implementation has been well-planned. Any system information to be migrated should be collated and backed-up up to six months before the start of the migration. IT managers should remember to assess how much hardware each virtual machine needs in order to operate efficiently. They also need to ensure that the number of virtual environments residing in a single hardware does not sprawl out of control - this could have serious consequences on the stability of the environment and application availability. A thorough implementation plan will help businesses minimize any hiccups that might arise.

Tip #4 – Assess levels of application availability and risk to business continuity

Despite the many benefits of virtualization, businesses are beginning to realize that there are risks associated with the technology. While virtualization is useful for protecting applications from planned downtime, protecting virtual environments from unplanned downtime is a different matter. Today, the cost of just a few minutes of unplanned downtime can be hugely detrimental and with virtual environments the risk is greater because server consolidation often results in a single point of failure for multiple applications. Businesses should therefore consider a solution that combines virtualization technology with the high availability protection necessary to keep the business going through disruptions.

Tip #5 – Demonstrate that virtualization won’t impact end users

After the implementation, it is critical to demonstrate to executive management that virtualization can be accomplished without hindering applications performance and without diminishing service to end users. IT managers should monitor closely the performance of initial deployments, and if necessary, modify hardware and networking configurations to ensure that the virtual environment is completely transparent to end-users.

Emerging virtualization technologies are opening doors by removing existing barriers of entry such as cost and complexity. More and more businesses of different sizes are starting to reap the benefits of server virtualization. But, before embarking on a virtualization project, organizations should assess their needs carefully, choose the right technology, make sure the implementation doesn’t impact end user performance - and start small.

If you have additional tips or recommendations that have helped you and your organization successfully deploy server virtualization, please leave a comment here and join the discussion!

A common question we get from analysts and something that continues to come up in discussions (see Brian Madden’s blog) is why we developed everRun VM for XenSource and not VMware. One of the biggest obstacles in developing a version of our software for protecting virtual environments was making a strategic decision on which hypervisor platform to develop for initially. Some of the key factors that weighed in on our decision were:

• Virtualization platform market share
• Robustness of the virtualization platform
• Performance of the virtualization platform
• Openness of the architecture
• Virtualization vendor’s approach to partnerships
• Compatibility with future Microsoft virtualization platforms

Although VMware was the clear market leader, for most of the criteria, XenSource (now Citrix Virtualization and Management Division) was a much better fit. To acheive the superior availability that everRun VM uniquely provides, it had to be tightly integrated with the hypervisor, the openness of the architecture was very important. And since our solution would be directed at virtualizing applications that weren’t being virtualized yet, in part due to concerns about their performance in virtual machines, the near “bare-metal” performance of XenServer was also a major advantage. XenSource’s philosophy of growing through an ecosystem of technology partners gave us the confidence that they would get the technical, management and marketing support required to achieve our time-to-market objectives. Finally, because of the company’s relationship with Microsoft and the planned interoperability between the XenServer platform and Microsoft’s Hyper-V, we are confident that developing for XenServer now would provide the shortest path to supporting Microsoft Hyper-V when it becomes available.

If you have any additional questions feel free to leave us a comment.

The Virtual Man posted this article today which we feel does a great job highlighting the different levels of virtual machine software. This is an important area to address because as we’ve discussed here before, the term “virtualization” is getting misconstrued frequently in and around the industry. Hopefully this will give a little more guidance to the decision makers. Dilbert’s boss could sure use it (see below).

We’ve been TALKING about everRun and how it works when implemented in a virtual environment, but now instead of just talking to you about it, we’ve created a flash demo so we can SHOW you how everRun works with XenServer Enterprise. For a quick version watch the video below, otherwise visit here for a higher quality demonstration.

The environment in which a hosted operating system runs on top of a hypervisor, providing the abstraction of a dedicated machine. By employing virtualization software, “space” is created within the host operating system allowing the user to install another guest operating system utilizing Windows, Linux, etc; which acts independently from all other virtual machines on that host.