Author:  Daryll Swager, Community Manager @Vizioncore

Today, I had a chance to discuss the vRanger Pro product with Jason Mattox, the CTO and Vice President of Support for Vizioncore.  The focus of the conversation revolved around the things that he likes about the vRanger Technology, and a look ahead to the exciting concepts in backup technology that will drive Vizioncore’s product development efforts in 2010.

Jason Mattox

Jason has 12 years of experience in IT consulting, during which he has focused on consolidation and virtualization from the desktop to the enterprise level. A hands-on technologist, he continues to design many of the features incorporated into market-leading virtualization backup and recovery solution vRanger Pro, as well as key features of Vizioncore’s other virtualization-enhancing products.

In addition to his role overseeing delivery of support services to Vizioncore clients, Jason regularly conducts Road Map presentations on best practices and future directions, and advises channel partners and customers about disaster recovery and business continuity implementations.

Jason, what generally excites you about the vRanger Pro product?

You know, the concept of “Backup” has hardly changed over the years.  Almost every software vendor has just been building on this framework of new data, new agent, new data to backup.  What excites me is the idea that we can turn this particular subject upside-down in a way, by thinking about the “new data” concept in a different way. 

Why not just pull the data from an image level  backup that has already been done or can be done going forward? Why not break the cycle of just adding another agent or adding more data that has to be piled on top of all the existing types of data in the datacenter today?  This data is duplicate data, already contained inside images today.  We have a real opportunity to start thinking about backup differently, and this is something that people are really going to start adopting this year.

What exciting things can we look forward to in 2010 with the vRanger Pro product?

I think mature application level recovery from Images is going to be one of the most exciting pieces of functionality coming up in 2010.

Using Application Level Recovery provides us the ability to recover files, databases, individual emails, and a pretty wide array of other objects.  Being able to recover all of these different types of objects using a single image level backup is going to change the way we think about backups today.

Please look for more blogs on backup and recovery, and other exciting topics, coming up soon.

Author: Daryll Swager, Community Manager @Vizioncore

Thanks to the Vizioncore team who attended the 2009 Dutch VMUG! From left to right, Danny Claproth, Tyler Jewell, Scott Herold, and Luc Borghoms

My Twitter feed was chirping every five seconds this morning as I was pouring my morning coffee here on the East Coast of the US.  These tweets were coming through at 4 or 5 times the rate they usually did on my feed, so I was confused as to what was going on.

As it turns out, tweets from the 2009 Dutch VMUG were primarily responsible for the crazy amount of chatter going on.  After spending quite a bit of time looking over all of the photos, stories, and videos that have been posted, I knew I must write a blog post compiling a lot of the exciting Vizioncore content that was on display during this VMUG session.

EcoShell and the VESI Project Hit Their Stride

One of the first things I noticed when I got online was the sheer volume of chatter revolving around VESI and how cool the PowerShell technology is.  It seems like everybody who saw this tool in action wanted to know more!

For those that are unfamiliar with VESI and EcoShell, here are some of the capabilities this product can offer:

• Gather – Access data from multiple standalone ESX Servers or vCenter instances to consolidate information from every layer of the virtualization stack including the operating systems, applications and infrastructure services.
• Filter – Easily identify inconsistencies and provide “health checks” on any virtual infrastructure and multi-platform environment with powerful time-saving filters that can be tuned, saved and leverage across the organization.
• Remediate – Reduce errors and streamline repetitive administrative tasks by efficiently modifying multiple objects across the infrastructure in a single operation.
• Report – Rapidly generate and customize reports for all types of IT- and business-related processes – save and print to a variety of formats such as XML, CSV, HTML and Microsoft Visio.
• Integrate - Leverage Windows PowerShell technology across the virtual environment to provide unparalleled integration capabilities with hypervisors, operating systems and application workloads, including support for Vizioncore vControl and Vizioncore vRanger Pro.

There’s a whole lot more to it.  I encourage people to take a look at the VESI project web site at:  http://www.thevesi.org/index.jspa

A couple of the primary drivers of the VESI excitement were Scott Herold ( left, Quest Software virtualization expert) and Eric Sloof (right, VMware Certified trainer, vExpert, and content owner of NTPRO.NL).  These two guys combined to make a very popular presentation titled “Managing VMware vSphere 4 with The Virtualization EcoShell”.

You can find the slide deck for this presentation as well as some video of Scott Herold doing a demo of EcoShell on Eric Sloof’s blog site at: http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/

There were a couple of other amazing presentations about EcoShell as well.  I encourage people to comment on this blog posting with other content that was contributed about EcoShell!

vFoglight Makes a Great Showing

The other thing that seemed to generate a lot of interest was Vizioncore’s vFoglight product.  There was a pretty constant crowd around the Vizioncore booth on the show floor, and a lot of people interested in seeing some of the capabilities of this great product.  Luckily, our very own Danny Claproth and Tyler Jewell were there to give people more information about vFoglight:

For those that want more information on how vFoglight can help you monitor your virtual environment and take action based on said monitoring, I encourage you to take a look at the demo page on Vizioncore’s web site at: http://www.vizioncore.com/products/demo.php

There’s also a link on the left hand side of this demo page where you can request a more in-depth demo of the product.

Thanks to Everyone for Your Participation in the 2009 Dutch VMUG

All in all, even when viewed from across the Atlantic, it seems as if the 2009 Dutch VMUG was more popular than ever, and certainly provided a lot of excitement even for the people who were not there.

Thanks to our Vizioncore team who attended, as well as for all of the other attendees who came out to have great discussions about great technology!

More Resources:

• Dutch VMUG Website: http://www.vmug.nl/cms/index.php
• Vizioncore’s Facebook Photo Album of the 2009 VMUG: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=177363&id=161639466549&ref=nf
• Twitter chatter about 2009 Dutch VMUG:  http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23dutchvmug

In the first two parts of the series we’ve been talking about the basics of vFoglight and how the system components operate.  In the previous post we were testing about 30 VMs, so now we’ve added another 70VMs bringing the total up to 100.  Again, we can look at the JVM Memory Usage and Load Estimator to see how taxed the system is. 

 

Figure 1 - JVM Memory Usage

Figure 2 - Load Estimator

As you can see in the figures, there is data growth over time and periodic spikes in load.  What is happening to cause the spikes?  Garbage Collection, GC for short, is running on the vFoglight Management Server during those spikes.  Essentially, as the JVM creates new objects, it uses memory to store the objects.  Over time these objects become unused and the system could reclaim that bit of memory space to reuse for other purposes.  That is what is happening during these spikes, GC is finding unused memory, clearing it out and allowing it to be reallocated.  Garbage collection is akin to Memory reclamation in many senses.

Since the load is acceptable for 100 VMs, we will now go ahead and add in approximately 650 additional VMs.  In total we’re now going to be importing 809 objects.  Objects are comprised of: Virtual Machines, ESX Hosts, Resource Pools, Folders, Clusters, Data Centers & vCenters.

Looking at the new load after adding the additional objects, we can observe that the load is maxing out the 2G of memory during GC periods.  As the host is well undersized for a 64-bit application, it will be shutdown and more memory will be added.

Figure 3 - JVM Memory Usage & Load Estimator

After adding memory to the system, which is also highlighted in Figure 3, we can see load is once again reasonable.  Essentially doubling the resources the vFoglight host, the load of the system has significantly dropped and performance has returned to normal.

vFoglight VM - Updated
OS - Windows 2003 R2 x86_64
vCPUs - 2
Memory - 4G (Changed from 2G)
Hard Drives - 3 VMDKs on Raid Group 2 (only VMDKs on the Datastore)
        10G C:\ (OS Partition - 64k aligned)
        5G D:\ (Swap Partition 4G Fixed size - 64k aligned)
        30G F:\ (Application Partition - 64k aligned)
vFoglight 5.2.6 x86_64

In the next post I’ll be talking about how we start to scale to something much bigger.  We’re already at 809 VMs/objects!  Next we will do over 2500 & 5000 VMs/objects on our way up to over 10,000 objects!

Stay tuned,
Thomas