Posts Tagged ‘Disaster Recovery’

Comparing Vizioncore vReplicator to Veeam Backup & Replication

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
Product Manager
Product Manager

It’s not easy comparing the two replication software leaders for VMware Infrastructure, Vizioncore and Veeam, just ask ITcomparison.com (Blog). In their October 9 post, “Vizion[c]ore vReplicator vs Veeam Backup & Replication” they took the time and effort to create a detailed comparison between us and Veeam. In addition, they even asked their readers, “If you think you got anything to add to [the comparison] at all, this is the place to do it.” Therefore we took the opportunity on their Blog site to comment on snapshots, ESXi and the Q4 release of vReplicator 3.0.

“We appreciate you taking the time to perform this comparison, as it can help better guide users toward choosing the replication solution that best meets their needs.  And to make your good comparison a little better, we’d like to provide a few clarifications and corrections.

In your comparison you noted that in vReplicator’s “hybrid” mode, a snapshot that is kept open between replication passes to record the changed blocks that are then copied to the target host. We’d like to note that vReplicator also provides the differential replication mode, which operates without maintaining an open snapshot; it scans the source VM and compares the results with the replica to determine the changed blocks that are copied over.  With a choice of these two replication modes, customers can select the right one based on their environment and replication needs.

With regards to failover, vReplicator provides the capability of test failover, an advantage that confirms the integrity of the DR VM by powering it on in an isolated state.

Another clarification is that neither product supports ESXi as a replication target. In addition, along with several performance improvements the Q4 release of vReplicator 3.0 will be licensed at $499 per socket.  The Beta Program is currently open and we can provide you with a copy of the beta release, if you’d like.”

In addition, we’d like to express our excitement for the release of vReplicator 3.0.

Key release 3.0 themes are

  • Improved replication performance
  • Additional support for VMware vSphere capabilities
  • New CPU-based licensing

And release 3.0 highlights include

  • Active Block Mapping (ABM) - a patent pending technology for fast replication performance
  • Changed block tracking
  • White space detection
  • Multi-thread processing
  • VMware vSphere Thin Provisioning support
  • VMware Storage VMotion support

In summary, vReplicator 3.0 is another benchmark release for Vizioncore specifically in the area of replication performance - speed and reduced network bandwidth.

Stay tuned for more information on vReplicator 3.0 by following Vizioncorum or any one of our social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

 

Disaster Recovery in Today’s World

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
James Kahn, Vizioncore Systems Engineer, Australia

James Kahn, Systems Engineer, Vizioncore Australia

It was just a few years ago when every organization wanted Disaster Recovery, and the few that had it only had “lip service” DR, which looks effective from the outside but is very unlikely to provide complete, or any, coverage if disaster strikes.  Now, thanks to virtualization, DR is accessible to most businesses.  But the challenge for today’s world is whether or not your solution matches your DR strategy.

In 2003 I was an IT consultant for a large retail company in New Zealand.  One of the projects I was involved in was to investigate full, wide-scale DR for their infrastructure.  After seeing the total costs for a physical DR solution - where you needed to match every server in the production data centre with an exact equivalent in the standby data centre – well not surprisingly they decided to postpone the project.  It was not too long ago when disaster recovery was restricted to companies with large budgets who could afford a solution.  With the emergence of virtualization we discovered that virtual machines are portable, encapsulated and hardware agnostic, making them flexible when it comes to DR.  The portability of virtual machines makes solutions for High Availability like vReplicator possible.

Also keep in mind that an effective DR strategy is much more than just choosing a solution and making sure your VMs are available at the remote site.  User access, Internet connections and communication between your servers and other sites are just as important.  No matter what software or hardware you use for your DR site, there should be much more involvement than choosing a solution and walking away.

The Vizioncore Systems Engineering team has collectively written a Best Practices Guide to cover how to best set up a DR site using vReplicator.  Additionally there is some excellent guidance on setting up a comprehensive DR solution in general.

Thanks for listening!  Feel free to comment below on your DR experiences.

-JK