The product manager for Site Recovery Manager has a blog post – asking customers who have deployed or used SRM in the last 90-days since its release for comments and ideas. This is a great opportunity if you have used the product to have your say.
The link to Jay’s post is here:
Despite the very helpful staff at VizionCore (see pictures below), it was Cisco’s Nexus who pipped them at the post for best “New Technology”
http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid94_gci1330801,00.html
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9902/index.html
This session was all about ThinApp, a product I only started playing with last week when I did my first teach of the VDM 2.1 product from VMware. I learnt some interesting stuff that I didn’t know about mainly because all I previously done was next-next-next usage of ThinApp. Firstly, it is possible and legal to make changes to the application after the installation AND before you “capture” and “build” the ThinApp. This is something I’ve been doing for sometime with Citrix Packager and WinINSTaller. The down side of doing this is – although its great to configure settings where sometime difficult to locate/set in the registry – it does assume that all the users will get the same settings…
Lee Dilworth and Dave Burgess are two SRM guys from the UK. Right now it sounds like EMEA is stronger on SRM than their counterparts in the US! This was my best session of VMworld mainly because it relates to topic which is very dear to my heart, and was technical presentation which really needed the audience to know the VMware SRM pretty well. Most of the SRM/BC/DR sesssion I went to were quite “general” and conceptual and didn’t deal with the nitty gritty day-to-day issues which is what I have to deal with.
So I got plenty of juicy gotchas, tips and FAQs some which I had seen but many which I hadn’t. I decided to mention the ones I hadn’t seen or understood before…
I mised both keynotes from the previous days. The 1st because I was busy judging the ServerSearchVirtualization Awards, and the 2nd because it started at 8am and I was still asleep!
This was session delivered by SRM’s product manager. Nothing shocking to report here if you are already pretty familiar with the SRM concept. They keep saying you can take your runbooks for DR, and programme them into SRM. But some would say the level of detail you get in a runbook would never be the same as SRM. Also, I noted that pitch was very much about site failover, rather failing over an individual line of business application, which is certainly possible but requires a lot prior planning on the storage side – so you can pick out different apps held on different LUNs.
Then there was pitch from a SAP guy, which really had nothing to do with SRM. All about SAP’s strategy… yawn… They went into the demo of SRM which was pretty funny. As the SAP Guy couldn’t log on the SAP installation on the Protected Site – to show a before & after like scenario. Like he’s SAP working before we pull the plug, and he’s me not getting SAP after the plug has been pulled. On the pull the plug side we had a live video stream of Lee & Dave (two cool SRM guys who I know in the UK who work from VMware)
Anyway, in the end the demo worked out – as they brought up the VMs on the recovery site, and where able to login to the SAP system. So DR was better than the real world!
One thing I did get from this session was a different view on SRM. That it could be used to facilate datacenter moves from one location to another
Struggling to find the real session name for this one, I left early because I spotted my pal, Charles Gautreaux leaving the hall (Charles invited me to North Carolina this year to open his VMware User Group Summit)…
This session was all about the new network layer which we will see in Vi4. It was all about a concept called a “Distributed Switch”. From ESX1.x.x to ESX3.x.x the virtual switch configuration was “host” specific. That is to say we had to configure each and every ESX host to have matching network configurations right down to port group names and security settings. A distributed switch is part of the new vNetwork platform – and introduces a layer of networking which actually spans ESX hosts. When you create a distributed switch is create across the datacenter/cluster and is usable by any ESX host – and you can set globally wide settings with such as VLAN settings. The key thing remember about distributed vswitch is that they are more than just tatooing or pushing out your regular vSwitch configuration from a central source.
Of course we will still be able to configure hardware specific, ESX host specific settings on these switches using “Host Profiles”. The host profile is a collection of popular settings for an ESX host. You can copy, paste and modify host profiles to reflect specific requirements to the ESX host. By combining both “host profiles” together with the distributed switch – you reduce your administrative burden of having to create switches on each-and-every ESX host, whilst retaining the ability to have custom settings per-ESX hosts.
The distributed switch will be a key componenent in the “Fault Tolerance” (AKA Continious HA) feature ensuring that a shadowed/mirrored VM gets exactly same network settings across the FT cluster it inhabits.
In the next release we will get the ability to set privileges on a vSwitch to control how “users” patch their virtual machines to the network – this should reduce the possibility of conflicts and misconfigurations.
There was some additional features mentioned in this session as well, such as the ability to “reboot” virtual switches. There are currently some settings such as increasing the number of ports on virtual switch which require a full reboot of the ESX host (together with a bulk/maintenance mode to move all the VMs off the host). The new reboot feature will not stop VMs communicating to the network (because it will be so quick) but will allow us to apply settings without downtime. I can see this going to be important compliament to the Cisco Nexus Virtual Switch announced this week.
Finally, the presenter outlined how the new APIs allow security vendors to hook into the vSwitch to do such things as TCP port filtering, and Intrusion Detection. These new APIs allow security orientated virtual appliances to apply settings to individual VMs, the Hypervisors or virtaul switch port group level
Just come from our VMworld Book Signing at the book store. Whilst we were signing – we sold the last copy of the Vi3 book. 
One of the guys who came up also had a copy of my “Limited Edition: Authors Edition” of my new SRM book. It’s still a rough cut, but it was pleasing to see these copies did go off the bookshelf pretty darn quick!
Only trouble with book signing was we were in the 1pm-1.30pm slot – which is just as the afternoon session start, so a great many people were in the seesions…
Anyway, I’m sat here charging up my laptop. I lost my charger for my iPAC so I’m without a phone. Probably won’t get mobile again until I pick up a replacement charger at the airport. Looking at my schedule I see I have another BC event to go to in half-an-hour. BC3820: Architecturing your VMware DR Solution..
More reports after that session.
This was a VMware presented session with VMware’s Virtual Desktop Manager 3.0 new feature of offline VDI. Now, offline VDI sounds like a contradiction in terms, but what’s meant is synchronizing your remote virtual desktop so it runs locally. You checkin and checkout your virtual machine to download and upload it to the VDM environment. It would be great hear at the Venetian given the Wifi is too intermittent for using Citrix or VDI!
The download time seems the biggest issue. It’s not a streamed destkop but a downloaded one. Sure only the blocks that contain data are downloaded, and after the first download – only changes are synch’d back. That’s all to the good – but the initially download even with broadband links is not going to be pretty. I imagine most people would not want to put a TTL on that download – to prevent the need to re-download the desktop.
Anyway, all in a good a feature – it’s pleasing to see VDM is maturing.
I’m mainly restricting myself to the BC Track this year – basically, because I am still fine-tuning my book on VMware’s Site Recovery Manager. So I’m always on the look out for tips, tricks, annecdotes about anything DR/BC related. This session was helpful in providing a background, trends, some recommendations.
It remind me of one thing I hadn’t tested with SRM. What would SRM do if you had a virtual machine with a VMware Snapshot assigned. I think it should be OK, after all the replication engine will just replicate all the files across to the recovery site. But I will be testing that configuration just validate it does work.
There were a couple of points which I wasn’t sure were technically accurate. For example we were told you couldn’t have VMware Snapshots with RDMs. Yes, you can as long use “virtual compatiablitlty”. Perhaps I misunderstood what the guy from Burton Group was getting at. The other thing was quite a lengthy discussion about VMotion and DR. Strictly speaking VMOtion is not a DR tool, but could be used for planned outages. What wasn’t mentioned was the requirement for stretched clustering and stretched VLANs to make it work….
David Davis, my fellow blogger and judge at this years ServerSearchVirtualization.com Awards has some interesting videos about running ESX inside a VMware Workstation instance.
Video link-
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