Windows Virtualization Team Blog : Disaster Recovery

Re-blog: Microsoft Site Recovery Solution Launch

porourke — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:27:00 GMT

I'm re-blogging here. Over at Virt Planet blog, Jim wrote the following:

This week Microsoft is launching a comprehensive solution to help customers implement cost effective, end-to-end site recovery programs. Built on proven capabilities in Windows Server 2008 R2 and the System Center management suite, Microsoft is helping IT Professionals leverage Windows Server Hyper-V and Failover Clustering along with tools like Virtual Machine Manager to deliver cost effective site recovery.

The Microsoft Site Recovery Solution ecosystem is ramping with a broad range of storage replication partners like Double-Take Software, EMC, HDS, HP delivering solutions that take advantage of the Microsoft Cluster Resource DLL. With cluster integration IT Professionals can deploy streamlined and operationally effective site recovery.

You can learn more about the Microsoft Site Recovery Solution by joining the Microsoft team and Enterprise Strategy Group on Thursday, November 5^th at 10:30am Pacific for a webcast Building Effective and Highly Available Disaster Recovery Solutions Using Microsoft Virtualization This webcast looks at key drivers for site recovery solutions and reviews practical deployment considerations (you can view the recorded version of the webcast after the 5^th). Microsoft and select partners will also be demonstrating Site Recovery Solutions at TechEd, so if you plan to be in Berlin during the week of November 9^th, make sure to stop by the Virtualization Solutions kiosk in the Technical Learning Center.

Patrick

Virtualization: desktop to datacenter

porourke — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:54:00 GMT

It's been a while since I've posted a blog ... but that one really caused a stir in the Virt circles in the Bay Area. Hopefully it doesn't mean I can't hit up those people for Sharks tickets.

I've stumbled across some interesting items that I wanted to share with you.

Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack 2009 R2 is now available. The big thing is support for Windows 7. Read the blog here. Here's an excerpt:

If you are an MDOP customer, you can download MDOP 2009 R2 through Microsoft Volume Licensing Site (MVLS). For others who wish to evaluate MDOP products, the MDOP software is available at MSDN and TechNet (in accordance with your MSDN or TechNet agreements, except for AIS).

MDOP has been licensed for over 21 million desktops worldwide! In a recent survey completed for Microsoft by Answers Research, and including 1000 IT professionals across five countries, we learned several interesting facts:

66% of MDOP customers deployed three or more of the MDOP products

52% of them deployed MDOP across more than half of their PCs

94% of MDOP customers said they would recommend MDOP to a colleague

When comparing MDOP and non-MDOP customers, customer satisfaction with Software Assurance increases by 25%

Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) V 1.0 SP1 - This updated tool will support Windows 7 and enable enterprise deployment of virtual Windows XP environments to support incompatible applications. A Beta version of MED-V 1.0 SP1 will be available by the end of 2009 and final release is scheduled for the first quarter of calendar year 2010.

On the server side, the latest is from Gartner Symposium in Orlando. Gartner announced their top 10 strategic technologies for 2010. Not surprisingly, virtualization is named or underlying several of the strategic technologies. And speaking of, Gartner also shared data on server virtualization adoption today and forecasted through 2012. Read this article. Here's an excerpt:

According to Gartner, 18% of server workloads this year run on virtualized servers; that share will grow to 28% next year and reach almost half by 2012. But growth is anticipated among the small-to-midsize businesses (SMB), and it's in this segment that Microsoft has a good chance to build a customer base. By 2012, VMware's share is expected to shrink to 65% but the base of VMs will have grown to 58 million, a 10-fold leap. By that time, Gartner believes, Microsoft will hold 27% share, Citrix 6%, Red Hat 2% and others about 1%.

Along those lines, I had a great email exchange a couple weeks ago with Steve at PoundHost in Maidenhead, UK. I was giving a presentation at IP Expo / VM Expo conference in London, and wanted to highlight PoundHost's business results since switching to Hyper-V and System Center away from VMware tools, and since PoundHost has deployed the Dynamic Datacenter Tookit for hosters. PoundHost has a very compelling story of how technology can really help a business transform itself and create new opportunities. The Microsoft case study doesn't really do it justice. Here's some of what Steve shared with me:

Cost. "It meant we could offer Linux and Windows at the same price (when we went live with the beta of R2 we had Linux guests but we don’t now). It means we can offer low cost VMs on high quality (and cost!) host servers which ultimately give the end user a better experience. [It] works out about £1.00 per guest assuming 60 guests per host."
Common management tools. "We were also very impressed with a demo we had seen of System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Ops Manager so we now use both in our infrastructure."
Choice. "I’m a VCP and have a lot of experience with ESX but I’d never use it again now I’ve used Hyper-V under R2"
Grow business. "[We've] expanded our Hyper-V/System Center offerings into our managed services company Server Arcade "
Grow business: profitability boost by 55%
Customer service. "We’re also doing the customer control panel now for Poundhost which is based on the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit."

Check out more about the Dynamic Datacenter toolkits and partner alliance at their blog.

Patrick O'Rourke

Guest Post: All Eyes on SteelEye with DataKeeper Support for Hyper-V

porourke — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 07:10:00 GMT

Hi all,

My name is Dave Bermingham and I’m the director of Windows product management for SteelEye Technology, a provider of business continuity and disaster recovery solutions. I’d like to thank Microsoft’s Virtualization team for the opportunity to guest blog on SteelEye’s continued support for Hyper-V as well as exciting new features coming in support of Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2.

I can’t believe it is almost a year ago since I demonstrated SteelEye DataKeeper Cluster Edition at the Microsoft Virtualization Launch event in Bellevue, WA. In the past year we have seen the interest in our Hyper-V disaster recovery products increase dramatically and with the recent release of Windows Server 2008 R2, I believe we have just seen the tip of the iceberg!

SteelEye’s mission is to “Replicate Any Data, Protect Any Application.” We pride ourselves on our commitment to provide the Windows marketplace with flexible, scalable and cost-effective solutions that are enterprise-grade yet customizable for any size business. Most recently SteelEye identified an opportunity to extend Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering (WSFC) by delivering SteelEye DataKeeper Cluster Edition, a real-time data replication solution that integrates seamlessly with WSFC to enable multi-site clusters while eliminating the single point of failure traditionally associated with shared storage resources. A comprehensive and cost-effective disaster recovery solution, DataKeeper Cluster Edition helps supports improved productivity and availability of your Hyper-V VMs.

SteelEye soon will be announcing support for Windows Server 2008 R2 and the highly anticipated “Live Migration”. As our Windows team continues to develop and build additional capabilities for enhanced disaster recovery support of Hyper-V, we welcome your comments and suggestions. To learn more about the latest developments for Hyper-V support, take a look at our FAQs or visit the SteelEye DataKeeper Cluster Edition page on our website.

Thanks,

Dave

Live Migration and Host Clustering available at no charge in Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

porourke — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 01:13:00 GMT

I’m Zane Adam, senior director of virtualization and System Center. It’s been a while since my last post, and wanted to update you on our standalone hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

Last Fall we released Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, a standalone hypervisor-based virtualization product that is available for free. We continue to add more features and value to this product in the upcoming release, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Our core strategy is to ensure that our customers can virtualize their IT environment in the most cost effective manner, and at the same time, have access to enterprise features like live migration and clustering features for high availability. So in addition to scalability and performance improvements in this version, customers can get live migration and host clustering capabilities and high availability (up to 16 nodes) at no charge.

Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 will continue to be free, and now will include live migration and host clustering capabilities. Customers won’t need to pay thousands of dollars for alternate virtualization platforms to get these features. With Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, customers have a solution for both planned and unplanned downtime and can use it for scenarios like server consolidation, branch server consolidation, high availability, and VDI.

These same features also will be available in Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-v, which provides our customers with core virtualization features as part of Windows Server offering. With Windows Server 2008 R2, customers also get flexible virtualization rights (e.g., 4 free virtual instances with Windows Server Enterprise Edition and unlimited virtual instances with Windows Server Datacenter Edition).

You can download Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 beta here. Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 can be managed by System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2. You can download the beta here.

You can find more info on Microsoft’s virtualization products and solutions at http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization.

Zane

Kroll Factual Data: 85% virtualized, 30:1 VM density

porourke — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:59:00 GMT

You may have never heard of Kroll Factual Data. But ever since personal credit became harder to acquire, lenders held tighter to their money, and interest rates went up/down like a roller coaster, Kroll has been on a wild ride of their own. In short, Kroll Factual Data offers business information to mortgage lenders, consumer lenders, property management firms and the federal government. So when Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve speaks, Kroll often sees the volume of demand for their services increase or decrease.

Chris Steffen of Kroll has posted guest blogs to this site before, and will be speaking on an webcast April 28 (register here). I first met Chris at VMworld 2007 in San Francisco. At the time he was using MS Virtual Server, SCVMM v1 wasn't fully deployed yet and he was waiting for Hyper-V to be released. At the time (Sept 2007), Kroll had 75% of their production servers virtualized, were processing 200,000-250,000 transactions a day, and were managing 1,400 virtual machines. That was amazing at that time. But nothing compared to what Kroll does today.

See the news release here about Kroll Factual Data. A few highlights:

acquired 58 companies in 5 years
"We’re now able to develop, test and deploy new products within three days"
"our datacenter has the ability to deploy additional computing resources in less than 15 minutes.”
a datacenter that is 85 percent virtualized
consolidate its physical server holdings from 650 systems to 22 systems, each server running 30 virtual machines
100 percent wind-generated power for the entire facility
“We’re required to provide 100 percent availability not only to our customer-facing products, but also to the operations inside our facility,”

There are 6 new videos of Kroll Factual Data posted here. You'll see/hear from Russ Donnan, CIO of Kroll Factual Data, and Chris Steffen. Here's my favorite

Patrick

Series on virtualizing SharePoint

porourke — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 21:20:00 GMT

The Microsoft-UK services team recently posted an in-depth virtualizing SharePoint series. It is a culmination of their experiences over the last couple years helping customers successfully host SharePoint in virtualized environments.

· Introduction

· Optimizing the performance of a virtualized SharePoint environment

· SharePoint server role recommendations in the virtualized SharePoint environment

· Monitoring and managing a virtualized SharePoint environment

· High availability and disaster recovery, deployment best practices, common mistakes and summary

This is fantastic guidance for those organisations currently running, or thinking of running SharePoint in virtualized environments. Enjoy!

Patrick

Guest Post: Virtual Eggs in One Virtualization Basket?

porourke — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 09:43:00 GMT

Hi, my name is Dave Demlow and I am the Chief Technology Officer at Double-Take Software.

Double-Take Software has been a leading provider of data replication and failover technologies for Microsoft Windows Server and applications going all the way back to Windows NT 3.51. So like many of you, we’ve seen many changes in the role that Windows Servers play in the enterprise and in the increased requirements for the availability and protection of Windows-based workloads. Hyper-V will accelerate those changes but at the same time make it much easier and more cost effective than ever to provide those higher levels of availability to an even broader range of workloads.

As Jeff Woolsey highlighted so well in his post on Hyper-V Quick Migration, “Virtualization actually creates a major problem: single point of failure.” And if the problem with that isn’t crystal clear,” If that virtualization server goes down and I don’t have a HA solution in place, I will lose my job.”

The hypervisor is only one of many possible points of failure to be concerned with. If the shared storage in a Hyper-V cluster is unavailable due to a site failure, power failure or corruption, ALL of your workloads that rely on that storage or site will also be down.

Fortunately, Windows Server 2008 provides two enabling technologies, Hyper-V and Failover Clustering, that when used with 3^rd party products such as our GeoCluster for Windows or Double-Take for Windows software can create clusters of Hyper-V servers that offer redundancy through replicated storage. Optionally, these can be geographically dispersed to maintain availability of virtualized workloads even when entire sites or datacenters are inoperative also providing for off-site disaster recovery. These are sometimes referred to as “multi-site” or “stretched” clusters and our customers often simply refer to them by our brand name GeoCluster.

As an example, with our GeoCluster product, multiple Hyper-V nodes in a cluster could store independent replicas of each protected virtual machine that are continuously updated as the virtual machine is changed. An example cluster might have 4 nodes in New York, Chicago, LA and Seattle. On the New York node, 10 virtual machines are running and replicating to the other 3 nodes. In LA, 5 other VMs are running in LA but only replicating to Chicago and so on. In the event of an unplanned outage, virtual machines could automatically failover to any site with a replica in a pre-set priority order…perhaps the VMs in New York failover to Chicago first, then Seattle then to any surviving site. The flexibility with software-based replication technologies is extensive, allowing replication between different types of servers, between different storage technologies and allowing very granular selection of which VMs should be replicated and which should not, even on the same disk or LUN.

While SANs and iSCSI storage are supported in a GeoCluster, cluster nodes can even use direct attached storage of nearly any type. VMs normally stored on high performance Fibre Channel or SAS drives could be replicated to a node with internal SATA drives to optimize costs. Hardware independence and flexibility are two key benefits of many software based replication and failover solutions such as Double-Take and GeoCluster software.

While the emphasis on multi-site clusters is often to maintain availability of VMs across unexpected site outages, it is also possible to use our GeoCluster product to perform planned migration of running virtual machines with minimal downtime, also known as Quick Migration. This process works exactly the same as it would between cluster nodes using a shared disk with the additional step that “under the hood” the saved memory state on the previous node is automatically replicated to the destination node before the VM is “resumed” and continues running exactly where it was previously.

In conclusion, if you are concerned about the availability of the virtual eggs in your virtualization basket, consider implementing Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V along with 3^rd party multi-site cluster solutions to provide complete infrastructure and datacenter redundancy to maintain availability of your virtualized workloads across server, storage or even site level disasters.

Dave Demlow

DPM for data backup/recovery of virtualized apps and environments

porourke — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:47:00 GMT

We want to congratulate the Microsoft Storage Solutions team for releasing Service Pack 1 for System Center Data Protection Manager 2007.

SP1 for DPM 2007 brings some great new capabilities for protecting Hyper-V environments. Most notably, of course, is the ability to protect guests within Hyper-V environments, often without downtime (for those guests running a Windows operating system that supports VSS). Also new for DPM with SP1 is the ability to run the DPM server on the Hyper-V host itself, so that the DPM server can protect the guests from the host viewpoint, within the same physical server - to disk, to tape and even to the cloud.

And unlike other (shall-not-be-named) virtualization platforms’ backup mechanisms, DPM does not require a SAN and does not require 3rd party backup software or add-ons. It’s an all Microsoft backup and recovery solution for Microsoft’s virtualization platform.

For more details on the SP1 release for DPM 2007, check out:

· Bala’s executive viewpoint on DPM 2007 sp1

· Some early SP1 customers are also blogging about their experiences and you can see at these links – ICON & Convergent Computing

· A feature overview of DPM SP1 is located here

The DPM folks have dedicated resources on “How to protect virtualized environments with DPM 2007” – http://www.microsoft.com/DPM/virtualization. And a very cool podcast showing how to protect Hyper-V with DPM 2007 SP1 - http://edge.technet.com/Media/DPM-2007-SP1-Protecting-Hyper-V

Congrats to the DPM crew – and nice job on backing up Hyper-V !!!

Patrick

For $50,000, I could pay someone to move my virtual machines for me

porourke — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:47:00 GMT

The title of this post will make sense in a moment. It's a quote from a customer in Australia ... and pretty funny one, too. But before that, a few items crossed my inbox that I thought I'd share:

Software vendor AspenTech has a process engineering/manufacturing application called aspenONE. Today they announced that their customer BASF deployed aspenONE using Microsoft App-V. I found this interesting for a few reasons. One, I've participated in conversations about whether enterprise customers would deploy 3rd-party apps running on App-V/SoftGrid without some sort of application certification program/logo for App-V. Second, BASF runs large, complex chemical process simulations - and now they're doing so as a network service. I know these sorts of computer-aided engineering apps often times get computed on HPC clusters; but never did I think they'd then get streamed at sufficient speed to the desktop using application virtualization. I'll be interested to see/read about more ISVs packaging their apps this way for enterprise customer deployments.
Along the lines of App-V, J.C. over at the App-V blog noted some new downloads:

Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 security configuration wizard. Download here.
Microsoft Application Virtualization best practices anayzer. Download here.

J.C. wrote last week that App-V 4.5 for Terminal Services license will be available Nov. 1. Read more here.
Adam over at TechNet Edge just posted a video interview with the authors of "Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Unleashed." I mentioned Rand's and Jeff's book a couple weeks ago. I had the opportunity to meet Rand/Jeff last week while they were up here in Redmond. Rand spoke to a bunch of us about Convergent's business, and set us straight that applications (Exchange, Sharepoint) and solutions such as disaster recovery and compliance are driving his customers' infrastructure purchases (e.g., Windows Server, Hyper-V, System Center) ... not the other way around. Here's a link to Jeff's blog.

Finally, the headline to this Australian article caught my eye over the weekend: "PacLib performs VMware analysis but chooses Microsoft." The money quote, which I already alluded to, comes from IT manager David Furey when discussing VMware's proposal:

“They came back with a proposal of about $25,000 in installation costs and another $25,000 in software costs,” Furey told iTnews. “You’ve got to question whether it’s worth paying $50,000 for that. I know the VMware camp go on about features like VMotion, but for $50,000 I could pay someone to move my virtual machines for me.”

Hmm, sounds eerily similar to something I read at VMworld 2008. ;-)

In a couple weeks I'll be attending Gartner's Data Centre conference in Amsterdam and plan to blog about some of the sessions. Let me know if you'll be there so we can compare notes and share an adult beverage.

Patrick

Disaster Recovery – not a nightmare with virtualization

porourke — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 01:53:00 GMT

Hello all, my name is Chris Steffen and I am the Principal Technical Architect at Kroll Factual Data.

Kroll Factual Data is a company that provides business information to mortgage lenders, consumer lenders, property management firms and other businesses. We have been a part of the Microsoft Technology Adoption Program for virtualization products for the past several years, and we have about 1,500 Virtual Machines (VM) across our computing environment.

As companies experiment with server virtualization, one of the benefits that is seemingly overlooked (or not emphasized as often as it should be) by those discussing virtualization technologies is the impact that virtualization can have when creating & maintaining a disaster recovery environment.

Put simply, the more that your production environment is virtualized, the easier it is to build a disaster recovery environment using the golden images created for your production systems.

For years, I had worried about my company’s ability to recover from a catastrophic disaster. But over the last 18 months, we have utilized Microsoft Virtual Server to create the situation that we are in today:

We have a production data center environment that is 85% virtualized. All of the golden images are replicated to our Disaster Recovery (DR) site (the golden image store is constantly updated to the DR site, and the updated / patched / modified golden images are automatically copied to DR as soon as they are changed). We have standing virtual machine hosts awaiting a VM image (these machines are running and used for testing). Our Internet circuits and vendor connections are “hot” and tested constantly. Databases and all other non-VM machines are already duplicated and maintained at DR (we’re talking a couple dozen machines, not the 600 that are located in our production environment today).

Were we to experience a major disaster, the IT staff at our DR site would immediately start the process of copying VM images to selected hosts. We would change our circuit routing and externally hosted Domain Name Service to the DR IP range. After the VMs have been copied to the host machines, we would start to bring up the “new” data center. Our testing has shown that this can realistically be completed in less than a day, but we have a 24 hour Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

Our DR site is populated by our hand-me-down equipment. But with server virtualization, this is not a problem. Sure, you may not be able to run 20 VMs on a single host machine due to the older hardware configs, but even if you can only run a quarter of that number, you are gaining additional life out of “end of life” equipment, and getting your production systems up and running in pretty much the same condition that they were running in your real production environment.

I still worry about business continuity situations (who doesn’t?). But the DR plan that we have established for our core technology finally lets me rest a little bit better. And using the Microsoft virtualization software and their System Center management tools has made the entire disaster recovery project more cost effective, not only from a licensing and equipment side, but from a manpower / administrative perspective. As you embrace a virtualization technology, keep disaster recovery in the back of your mind as another solution to your DR maintenance nightmare.

I welcome your questions or comments.

Chris