This posting is ~5 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
It is pretty common that vendors offer their products in special editions for SMB customers. VMware offers VMware vSphere Essentials and Essentials Plus, Veeam offers Veeam Backup Essentials, and Vembu has Vembu BDR Essentials.
Now Vembu has extended their Vembu BDR Essentials package significantly to address the needs of mid-sized businesses.
Vembu Technologies/ Vembu BDR Essentials/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
Affordable backup for SMB customers
Most SMB virtualization deployments consists of two or three hosts, which makes 4 or 6 used CPU sockets. Because of this, Vembu BDR Essentials supportes up to 6 sockets or 50 VMs. Yes, 6 sockets OR 50 VMs. Vembu has no rised this limit to 10 Sockets OR 100 VMs! This allows customers to use up to five 2-socket hosts or 100 VMs with less than 10 sockets.
Feature Highlights
Vembu BDR Essentials support all important features:
Agentless VMBackup to backup VMs
Continuous Data Protection with support for RPOs of less than 15 minutes
Quick VM Recovery to get failed VMs up and running in minutes
Vembu Universal Explorer to restore individual items from Microsoft applications like Exchange, SharePoint, SQL and Active Directory
Replication of VMs Vembu OffsiteDR and Vembu CloudDR
Needless to say that Vembu BDR Essentials support VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. If necessary, customer can upgrade to the Standard or Enterprise edition.
This posting is ~5 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
Vembu Technologies was founded in 2002, and with 60.000 customers and more than 4000 partners, Vembu is a leading provider with a comprehensive portfolio of software products and cloud services to small and medium businesses.
Backup is important. There is no reason to have no backup. According to an infographic published by Clutch Research at the World Backup Day 2017, 60% of all SMBs that lost all their data will shutdown within 6 months after the data loss. Pretty bad, isn’t it?
When I talk to SMB customers, most of them complain about the costs of backups. You need software, you need the hardware, and depending on the type of used hardware, you need media. And you should have a second copy of your data. In my opinion, tape is dead for SMB customers. HPE for example, offers pretty smart disk-based backup solutions, like the HPE StoreOnce.
Vembu is giving away an Amazon gift cards through a lucky draw for those readers, that take part of a short Survey
Vembu Technologies/ Vembu BDR/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
Vembu BDR Suite provides a 30-day free trial with no restriction. This gives you the chance to intensively test Vembu BDR Suite prior purchase.
The free edition let you choose between unlimited VMs, that are covered with limited functionality, or unlimited functionality for up to 3 VMs. Check out this comparison of free, standard and enterprise edition. Check out this comparison of free, standard and enterprise edition.
This posting is ~5 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
Vembu Technologies was founded in 2002, and with 60.000 customers and more than 4000 partners, Vembu is a leading provider with a comprehensive portfolio of software products and cloud services to small and medium businesses.
Last week, Vembu has announced the availability of Vembu BDR Suite v4.0! Vembu’s new release is all about maintaining business continuity and ensuring high availability. Apart from new features, this release features significant enhancements and bug fixes that are geared towards performance improvement.
Vembu Technologies/ Vembu BDR Essentials/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
The Vembu BDR Suite
The Vembu BDR Suite is an one stop solution to all your backup and disaster recovery needs. That is what Vembu says about their own product. The BDR Suite covers
Backup and replication of VMs running on VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V
Backup and bare-metal recovery for physical servers and workstations (Windows Server and Desktop)
File and application backups of Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft Outlook, and MySQL
Creating of backup copies and transfer of them to a DR site
Vembu BDR Suite v4.0 has got some pretty nice new features. IMHO, there are four highlights:
Hyper-V Failover Cluster Support for Backup & Recovery
Shared VHDX Backup
Hyper-V Checksum Based Incremental, and the
Credential Manager
There is a significat chance that you use a Hyper-V Failover Cluster if you have more than one Hyper-V host. With v4.0 Vembu added support for backup and recovery for the VMs residing in a Hyper-V Failover Cluster. Even if the VMs running on Hyper-V cluster move from one host to another, the backups will continue to run without any interruption.
A feature, that I’m really missing in VMware and Veeam, is the support for the backup shared VHDX files. v4.0 added support for this.
Vembu BDR Suite v4.0 also added support bot performing incremental backups with Hyper-V. They call it Checksum based incremental method, but it is in fact Change Block Tracking. An important feature for Hyper-V customers!
The Vembu Credential Manager allows you to store the necessary credentials at one place, use it everywhere inside the Vembu BDR Suite v4.0.
But there are also other, very nice enhancements.
Handling new disk addition for VMware ESXi and Hyper-V, which allows the backup of newly added disks at the next backup. In prioir releases, newly added disks were only backuped during the next full backup.
Reconnection for VMware ESXi and Hyper-V jobs in case of a dropped network connection
Application-wware processing for Hyper-V VMs can now enabled on a per-VM basis
API for VM list with Storage utilization report which allows you to generate detailed reports whenever you need one
This posting is ~5 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
Vembu was founded in 2002 and has over 60,000 customers worldwide. One of their core products is the Vembu BDR Suite, which is an one stop solution to all your Backup and DR needs. I wrote a longer blog post about the Vembu BDR Suite.
One part of this suite is Vembu VMBackup, which is a data protection solution that is designed to backup VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines secure and simple way. The offered features are compareable to Veeam Backup & Replication.
The core component of Vembu VMBackup is the Vembu BDR Backup server, which can be deployed in two ways:
On-premises Deployment
Hybrid Deployment
virnuls/ pixabay.com/ Creative Commons CC0
On-premises Deployment
In this deployment setup, customers deploy the product in their local environment. I think this is the most typical deployment type, where you install VMBackup on a physical server, in a VM or deployed as virtual appliance. Backup data is transferred over LAN or SAN, and is written to the storage repositories. The Vembu BDR server acts as a centralized management point, where user can configure and manage backup and replication jobs.
In a simple deployment, the Vembu BDR Backup Server will act as backup proxy and management server instance. It is perfect for a small number of VMs with less simultaneous backup traffic and for VMBackup evaluation. The typical SMB environment.
If you seperate the management server from the backup proxy, the deployment changes to a distributed deployment. If necessary, multiple backup proxies can be deployed on physical hosts or in virtual machines. Customers can also deploy multiple BDR backups servers, which allows load balancing across a cluster of BDR backup servers. Pretty cool for bigger and/ or distributed environments. It allows customers to scale their backup solution over time.
On-Premises Deployment/ Vembu Technologies/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
Hybrid Deployment
Backup is good, but having a backup copy offsite is better. Vembu OffsiteDR allows customers to create a copy of their backup data and transfer it to a DR location over LAN/ WAN. OffsiteDR instantly transfers backup data from a BDR Backup Server to an OffsiteDR server. Customers can restore failed VMs or missing files and application data in their DR site, or they can rebuild a failed BDR Backup Server from an OffsiteDR server.
Vembu Technologies/ OffsiteDR/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
If customers don’t have a DR site, they can use Vembu CloudDR push a backup copy to the Vembu cloud. The data stored in the Vembu Cloud can easily be restored at anytime and to any location. Vembu uses AWS across all continents to asure the availability of their cloud services.
Vembu Technologies/ CloudDR/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
Customers have the choice
It is obvious that customers have the freedom of choice how they deploy Vembu VMBackup.I like the virtual appliance approach, which eliminates the need for additional Windows Server licenses. More and more vendors tend to offer appliances for their products, just think about VMware vCenter Server Appliance, vRealize Orchestrator etc. So why not offer a backup server appliance? I wish other vendors would adopt this…
Another nice feature is the scale-out capability of Vembu. Start small and grow over time. Perfect for SMBs that want to start small and grow over time.
This posting is ~5 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
It is common that vendors offer their products in special editions for SMB customers. VMware offers VMware vSphere Essentials and Essentials Plus, Veeam offers Veeam Backup Essentials, and now Vembu has published Vembu BDR Essentials.
Vembu Technologies/ Vembu BDR Essentials/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
Backup is important. There is no reason to have no backup. According to an infographic published by Clutch Research at the World Backup Day 2017, 60% of all SMBs that lost all their data will shutdown within 6 months after the data loss. Pretty bad, isn’t it?
When I talk to SMB customers, most of them complain about the costs of backups. You need software, you need the hardware, and depending on the type of used hardware, you need media. And you should have a second copy of your data. In my opinion, tape is dead for SMB customers. HPE for example, offers pretty smart disk-based backup solutions, like the HPE StoreOnce. But hardware is nothing without software. And at this point, Vembu BDR Essentials comes into play.
Affordable backup for SMB customers
Most SMB virtualization deployments consists of two or three hosts, which makes 4 or 6 used CPU sockets. Because of this, Vembu BDR Essentials supportes up to 6 socketsor 50 VMs. But why does Vembu limit the number of sockets and VMs? You might missed the OR. Customers have to choice which limit they want to accept. Customers are limited at the host-level (max 6 sockets), but not limited in the amount of VMs, or they can use more than 6 sockets, but then they are limited to 50 VMs.
Feature Highlights
Vembu BDR Essentials support all important features:
Agentless VMBackup to backup VMs
Continuous Data Protection with support for RPOs of less than 15 minutes
Quick VM Recovery to get failed VMs up and running in minutes
Vembu Universal Explorer to restore individual items from Microsoft applications like Exchange, SharePoint, SQL and Active Directory
Replication of VMs Vembu OffsiteDR and Vembu CloudDR
Needless to say that Vembu BDR Essentials support VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. If necessary, customer can upgrade to the Standard or Enterprise edition.
Now the fun part – the pricing. Customers can save up to 50% compared to the Vembzu BDR Suite.
Vembu Technologies/ Vembu BDR Essentials Pricing/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
The licenses for Vembu BDR Essentials are available in two models:
Subscription, and
Perpetual
Subscription licenses are available for 1, 2, 3 and 5 years. The perpetual licenses is valid for 10 years from the date of purchase. The subscription licensing has the benefit, that it included 24×7 technical support. If you purchase the perpetual license, the Annual Maintenance Cost (AMC) for first year is free. From the second year, it is 20% of the license cost, and it is available for 1, 2 or 3 years.
There is no excuse for not having a backup
With Vembu BDR Essentials, there is no more excuse for not having a competitive backup protecting your business! The pricing fits any SMB customer, regardless of their size or business. The rich feature set is competitive to other vendors, and both leading hypervisors are supported.
A pretty nice product. Try it for free! Vembu also offers a free edition that might fit small environments. The free edition let you choose between unlimited VMs, that are covered with limited functionality, or unlimited functionality for up to 3 VMs. Check out this comparison of free, standard and enterprise edition.
This posting is ~5 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
I have worked with a lot of backup software products during my career, but for the last years I have primarily worked with MicroFocus Data Protector (former HP OmniBack, HP Data Protector, or HPE Data Protector), and Veeam Backup & Replication. Data Protector was a great solution for traditional server environments, or when UNIX (HP-UX, AIX, Solaris etc.) compatibility was required. Features like Zero Downtime Backups, LAN-free or Direct SAN backups were available for many years. But their code quality has suffered severely in the recent years. The product no longer seemed like a one-stop shop. Some months ago, HPE sold its software division to MicroFocus and started to sell Veeam Backup & Replication through its channel. Some months prior selling the complete software division, HPE acquired Trilead, which is many of us well known because of their VM Explorer. Sad but true: Data Protector is dead to me.
I think I don’t have to say much about Veeam. Veeam is unbeaten when it comes down to virtualized server environments, and they constantly add features and extend their product portfolio. Think about their solutions Office 365, or Veeam Agent for Windows and Linux.
Why Vembu?
It is always good to have more than product in the portfolio, just because to give customers the choice between different products. If your only tool is a hammer, everthing looks like a nail. That is why I took a closer look at Vembu. I became aware of Vembu, because they asked to place an ad on vcloudnine. This was a year ago. So it was obvious to take a look at their products. Furthermore, Vembu and its products were mentioned many times in my Twitter timeline. Two good reasons to take a look at them!
Vembu Technologies was founded in 2002, and with 60.000 customers and more than 4000 partners, Vembu is a leading provider with a comprehensive portfolio of software products and cloud services to small and medium businesses. We are not talking about a newcomer!
The Vembu BDR Suite
The Vembu BDR Suite is an one stop solution to all your backup and disaster recovery needs. That is what Vembu says about their own product. The BDR Suite covers
Backup and replication of VMs running on VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V
Backup and bare-metal recovery for physical servers and workstations (Windows Server and Desktop)
File and application backups of Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft Outlook, and MySQL
Creating of backup copies and transfer of them to a DR site
Let’s have a more detailed look at the Vembu BDR Suite. This is a picture of the overall architecture.
Vembu Technologies/ Vembu BDR Suite architecture/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
VMBackup
VMBackup provides fast, efficient and agentless backup for VMs hosted on VMware ESXi and on Microsoft Hyper-V. It also provides the capability to replicate virtual machines from one ESXi host to another ESXi (VMreplication). You might guess it – This feature is only available for VMware ESXi. In case of Microsoft Hyper-V, you have to use the built-in Hyper-V replication. The failover and failback of replicated VMs is managed by the BDR Backup Server. VMBackup offers instant VM recovery, recovery of single files and folder from image-level backups, and recovery of application items from Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft Active Directory. The functionality is similar to what you know from other products, like Veeam Backup & Replication, or MicroFocus Data Protector. VMBackup is licensed per socket, and it is available in a Standard (~ 150 $ per socket) and an Enterprise (~ 250 $ per socket) edition.
ImageBackup
ImageBackup addresses something, that might be extinct for some of us: Physical servers, like physical database or file servers. It can take image backups of Windows servers and workstations. This allows customers to restore the entire server or workstation from scratch to the same, or to new hardware. ImageBackup utilizes the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to create a consistent backup of a physical machine. Customers can restore a backup to the bare-metal, restore single files and folders, as well as application items from Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft Active Directory. If necessary, the can be restored to a supported hypervisor. With other words: P2V migration. ImageBackup is licensed per host, or per application server if you wish to take backups of applications like Microsoft Exchange or SQL server. ImageBackup for servers costs ~ 150 $, and it is free for workstations.
NetworkBackup
NetworkBackup addresses the backup of files, folders and application data from Windows, Mac and Linux clients. It is designed to protect business data across file servers, application servers, workstations and other endpoints. It does not take an image backup, but full and incremental backups. The feature set and use case of NetworkBackup is similar to “traditional” backup software like MicroFocus Data Protector or ARCServe. NetworkBackup offers intelligent scheduling policies, bandwidth management and flexible retention polices. Clients are not always onsite, to address this, NetworkBackup can store its data in the Vembu Cloud (Vembu Cloud Services). NetworkBackup is licensed per file server (~ 60 $ per server), application server (~ 150 $), or workstation (free).
OffsiteDR
OffsiteDR creates and transfers backup copies to a DR site. Data is immediately transferred when it arrives at the backup server. The Data is encrypted in-flight using industry-standard AES 256 encryption. WAN optimization is included, which means that data is compressed, encrypted and deduplicated before being replicated to the OffsiteDR server. The recovery of VMs and files can directly be done from the OffsiteDR server. So there is no need to setup a new backup server in case of a disaster recovery. OffsiteDR covers different recovery screnarios, like instantly recover machines directly from the Vembu OffsiteDR server, bare-metal restore using the Vembu Recovery CD, or restore the virtual machine as on a VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V server directly from the Vembu OffsiteDR server. OffsiteDR is an add-on to VMBackup, and it is licensed per CPU socket (~ 90 $).
Universal Explorer
The Universal Explorer is used to restore items from various Microsoft applications, like Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, or Active Directory. An item can be an email, a mailbox, complete databases, user or group objects etc. These items are sourced from image-level backups of physical and virtual machines. You might see some similarities to Veeam Explorer. Both products are comparable.
Recovery CD
The Vembu Recovery CD can be used to recover physical or virtual maschines. Drivers for the target platform will be injected during the restore. This is pretty handy in case of P2P and V2P migrations.
Licensing & Editions
Vembu offers a subscription and a perpetual license model. The subscription model can be purchased on a monthly or yearly basis, such as 1, 2, 3 or 5 years. It includes 24/ 7 standard technical support, updates and upgrades throughout the licensed period. The perpetual licensing model allows you to purchase and use the Vembu BDR suite by paying a single fee. This includes free maintenance and support for the first year.
With 60.000 customers and 4000 partners, Vembu is not a newcomer in the backup business. The product portfolio is quite comprehensive. The Vembu BDR Suite offers industry standard features to a very sweet price. I can’t see any feature, that a SMB customer might require, which is not available. In sum, the Vembu BDR suite seems to me to be a very good alternative to the top dogs in the backup business, especially if we are talkin about SMB customers.
This posting is ~9 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
There’s a world below clouds and enterprise environments with thousands of VMs and hundered or thousands of hosts. A world that consists of maximal three hosts. I’m working with quite a few customers, that are using VMware vSphere Essentials Plus. Those environments consist typically of two or three hosts and something between 10 and 100 VMs. Just to mention it: I don’t have any VMware vSphere Essentials customer. I can’t see any benefit for buying these license. Most of these environments are designed for a lifeime of three to four years. After that time, I come again and replace it with new gear. I can’t remember any customer that upgraded his VMware vSphere Essentials Plus. Even if the demands to the IT infrastructure increases, the license stays the same. The hosts and storage gets bigger, but the requirements stays the same: HA, vMotion, sometimes vSphere Replication, often (vSphere API for) Data Protection. Maybe this is a german thing and customers outside of german are growing faster and invest more in their IT.
Hyperconverged, scale-out IT infrastructure for SMBs?
Think enterprise and break it down to smaller customers. That is said easily, but we saw so many technologies coming from the enterprise down to the SMBs over the last years. Think about SAN. 15 years ago, no SMB even thought about it. Today it’s standard.
I’ve taken this statement from the Nutanix webseite.
Nutanix simplifies datacenter infrastructure by integrating server and storage resources into a turnkey appliance that is deployed in just 30 to 60 minutes, and runs any application at any scale.
When working with SMBs, most of them have to deal with a tight budget. This means that they use the maximum principle, to get most hardware, software and service for their money. Customers do not like long implementation phases. Long implementation phases means, that lots of money can’t invested in hardware or software. Every single Euro/ Dollar/ $CURRENCY invested for service can’t be invested in hardware and software.
Another important requirement for the most SMBs is simple operation. I know a lot customers with only one, two or three people, that doing all that stuff around helpdesk, server, networking etc. IT infrastructure, or IT in general, isn’t the main focus for many of them. It should just work. Every day. Until it’s replaced.This applies not only to the area of server virtualization, it applies to IT in general. This often requires lean and simple designs, designs that follow the principle of error prevention. Because of this, it’s a good practice to reduce the components used in a design and automate where it’s useful and valuable. And if a solution is robust, then this can only be an advantage.
Why Nutanix?
In my opinion, simplicity is the key to sucess. If you see Nutanix for the first time, you will be surprised how easy it is to manage. Deployment, operation, updates. It’s slick, it’s simple, it’s lightweight. Everything the customer needs, is combined on 2U. The same applies to the support. I’ve followed the discussion on Twitter between Nutanix and VMware on who may/ can/ is allowed to provide support for VMware. It was started by a blog post of Chuck Hollis (10 Reasons why VMware is leading the hyperconverged industry). To make it short: I don’t share his opinion. In my opinion, Nutanix focus on customer experience is the key.
Simplicity and the ability to change
I don’t think that pre-configured systems like Fujitsu Cluster-in-a-box, VCE vBlocks or HP ConvergedSystems are the answer to simplified IT infrastructure for SMBs. They are not hyperconverged. They are pre-configured. That’s an important difference. Pre-configured doesn’t mean that it’s easy to manage or fast and easy to implement. SMBs want hyperconverged platforms to simplify their IT infrastructure. Okay, so why not buy any other offered hyperconverged platform on the market, like SimpliVity OmniCube, HP ConvergedSystems HC or VMware EVO:RAIL? Because these offerings are focused on VMware. The question was: Why Nutanix? Because you can run KVM, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESXi on it. That’s an unique selling point (USP). You can offer the customer a hyperconverged platform, that allows him to change to another hypervisor later. I think we all agree that VMware is the market leader. But Microsoft is catching up. All features of the Essentials Plus kit can be delivered with Microsoft Hyper-V (and much more if you add SCVMM). Remeber: I talk about the typical Essentials Plus customer. VMware vSphere Essentials Plus includes all what a customer needs: Failover, live migration, data protection, and if needed, replication. In my experience, DRS, Host Profiles and vSphere Distributed Switches are nice, but SMBs can’t take advantage of it (exceptions are not excluded…). Add the Microsofts SCVMM and the gap between VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V is even smaller. The licensing of Microsoft Windows Server makes it interesting for customers to take a look at Microsoft Hyper-V, especially if you take the licensing costs into account. Sure, it’s not all about CAPEX (capital expenditure), OPEX (operational expenditures) is also important. Don’t get me wrong, I love VMware. But it’s important to be prepared. If the customer decides to change to Microsoft Hyper-V, you should be able to deliver it.
How can it look like?
Depending on the computing and storage needs, take a closer look at the Nutanix NX-1000 or NX-3000 series. I think a NX-1350 or NX-3350/ 3360 block is a good catch. Add a VMware vSphere Essentials Plus kit (or some Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 licenses… maybe also System Center 2012), Veeam Backup Essentials, something to store the backups on, like a HP StoreOnce 2700, and your favorite switches for 10 GbE networking connectivity (for example two HP 2920 switches in a stack with 10 GbE modules). A complete datacenter on 5U. This is only an example, but I think this should fit for most SMB customers (depending how you define SMB…).
Famous last words
Is Nutanix the perfect fit for SMBs? Yes! Easy to implement, easy to manage and robust. Nutanix stands out with its platform independence. This allows customers to have a choice in regard of the used hypervisor. Investment protection is a valuable asset, if you constantly have to fight for budgets.
This posting is ~9 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
Some days ago I wrote two blog posts (part I and part II) about VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) with HP 3PAR Peer Persistence. Because I wrote about it in the first of the two blog posts, allow me to take a short description, what Peer Persistence is and what it does, from that blog post:
HP 3PAR Peer Persistence adds functionalities to HP 3PAR Remote Copy software and HP 3PAR OS, that two 3PAR storage systems form a nearly continuous storage system. HP 3PAR Peer Persistence allows you, to create a VMware vMSC configuration and to achieve a new quality of availability and reliability.
You can transfer the concept of a Metro Storage Cluster to Microsoft Hyper-V. There is nothing VMWare specific in that concept.
With the GA of 3PAR OS 3.2.1 in September 2014, HP announced a lot of new features. The most frequently mentioned feature is Adaptive Flash Cache. If you’re interested in more details about Adaptive Flash Cache you will like the AFC Deep dive on 3pardude.com. A little lost is the newly added support for Peer Persistence with Hyper-V. This section is taken from the release notes of 3PAR OS 3.2.1:
3PAR Peer Persistence Software supports Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 and Microsoft Windows 2012 R2 Server and Hyper-V, in addition to the existing support for VMware. HP 3PAR Peer Persistence software enables HP 3PAR StoreServ systems located at metropolitan distances to act as peers to each other, presenting a nearly continuous storage system to hosts and servers connected to them. This capability allows to configure a high availability solution between two sites or data centers where failover and failback remains completely transparent to the hosts and applications running on those hosts.
3PAR Peer Persistence with Microsoft Windows Server and Hyper-V
Currently supported are Windows Server 2008 R2 and Server 2012 R2 and the corresponding versions of Hyper-V. This table summarizes the currently supported environments.
HP 3PAR OS
Host OS
Host connectivity
Remote Copy connectivity
3.2.1
Windows Server 2008 R2
FC, FCoE, iSCSI
RCIP, RCFC
3.2.1
Windows Server 2012 R2
FC, FCoE, iSCSI
RCIP, RCFC
At first glance, it seems that Microsoft Windows Server and Hyper-V support more options in terms of Host and Remote Copy Connectivity. This is not true! With 3PAR OS 3.2.1, HP added the support for FCoE and iSCSI host connectivity, as well as the support for RCIP for VMware. At this point, there is no winner. Check HP SPOCK for the latest support statements.
With 3PAR OS 3.2.1 a new host persona (Host Persona 15) was added for Microsoft Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2, 2012 and 2012 R2. This host persona must be used in Peer Persistence configurations. This is comparable to Host Persona 11 for ESXi. The setup and requirements for VMware and Hyper-V are similar. For a transparent failover a Quorum Witness is needed and it has to be deployed onto a Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V host (not 2008, 2008 R2 or 2012!). Peer Persistence operates in the same manner as with VMware: The Virtual Volumes (VV) are grouped into Remote Copy Groups (RCG), mirrored synchronously between a source and destination storage system. Source and destination volume share the same WWN. They are presented using the same LUN ID and the paths to the destination storage are marked as standby. Check part I of my Peer Persistence blog series for more detailed information about how Peer Persistence works.
Final words
It was only a question of time until HP releases the support for Hyper-V with Peer Persistence. I would have assumed that HP makes more fuss about it, but AFC seems to be the killer feature in 3PAR OS 3.2.1. I’m quite sure that there are some companies out there that have waited eagerly for the support of Hyper-V with Peer Persistence. If you have any further questions about Peer Persistence with Hyper-V, don’t hesitate to contact me.
This posting is ~9 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
Virtualization is an awesome technology. Last weeks I visited a customer and we took a walk through their data centers. While standing in one of their data centers I thought: Imagine that all server, that they are currently run as VMs, would be physical?. I’m still impressed about the influence of virtualization. The idea is so simple You share the resources of the physical hardware between multiple virtual instances. I/O, network bandwidth, CPU cycles and memory. After nearly 10 years of experience with server virtualization I can tell that especially the memory resources is one of the weak points. When a customer experiences performance problems, they were mostly caused by a lack of storage I/O or memory.
The reason for this post
Today I like to write a bit about memory management of hypervisors, in this case the memory management of VMware ESXi (the trombone in the flutes orchestra) and Microsoft Hyper-V. They are the leading hypervisors on the market (source: Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure). But there is another cause, why I took a closer look at the memory management of Hyper-V: Microsofts support policies and recommendations for exchange servers in hardware virtualization environments. In the run up to a Exchange migration project I took a quick look into Microsofts TechNet, just to verify some questions. And then I stumbled over this statement, valid for Exchange 2013:
Exchange memory requirements and recommendations
Some hypervisors have the ability to oversubscribe or dynamically adjust the amount of memory available to a specific guest machine based on the perceived usage of memory in the guest machine as compared to the needs of other guest machines managed by the same hypervisor. This technology makes sense for workloads in which memory is needed for brief periods of time and then can be surrendered for other uses. However, it doesn’t make sense for workloads that are designed to use memory on an ongoing basis. Exchange, like many server applications with optimizations for performance that involve caching of data in memory, is susceptible to poor system performance and an unacceptable client experience if it doesn’t have full control over the memory allocated to the physical or virtual machine on which it’s running. As a result, using dynamic memory features for Exchange isn’t supported.
There are similar statement for Exchange 2007 and 2010. At the first moment I thought “Okay, looks like the Exchange-on-NFS thing”. Check Josh Odgersblog post if you want to know more about this Exchange-on-NFS thing. If you’re running your Exchange on NFS, don’t read it. There is reason to believe that you will go out and shoot a Microsoft engineer after reading it. After a couple of seconds I thought “What does dynamic memory feature mean?” This was the beginning of a journey into the deep of hypervisor memory management.
The derivation
Memory is the only component in a server that can’t be oversubscribed. That’s plausible, because you can schedule multiple VMs to a single CPU core using a time-slice mechanism. But you can’t share a memory cell, if a VM has stored data in it. Now you have a number of options. You can configue a static memory size for each VM. If you have 32 GB memory in your virtualization host, you can run e.g. two VMs with 8 GB and four VMs with 4 GB memory. But what if a VM needs more memory? Either you reduce the amount of memory for the other VMs or you have to add memory to your host. Not very flexible. Now suppose that the VMs take full advantage of its configured memory only very rarely. In this case we can use the unused memory for the running or new VMs. We can oversubscribe the memory of the physical host. But this only works as long as the number of actively used memory is less or equal the memory size of the host. We have to react only in the case that a VM wants to take full advantage of its configured memory.
How does VMware ESXi manages its memory?
VMware ESXi uses four technologies to manage its memory:
Transparent Page Sharing (TPS)
Ballooning
Memory Compression
Swapping
Since the introduction of large pages (2 MB memory pages), TPS is only used under memory contention (thanks to Manfred for this hint). With TPS the memory is divided into pages and the hypervisor checks, if some of the pages are identical. If this is the case, the hypervisor stores only one copy of page and sets pointers to the identical ones. If you’re running a lot of similar VMs, then TPS can reduce the amount of used memory. Ballooning uses a special driver inside the VM. The hypervisor can use this driver to allocate memory inside of a VM. The OS inside the VM then frees up memory that isn’t used. The hypervisor then can reclaim that memory. Memory compression is used shortly before the hypervisor has to swap to disk. If a memory page can be compressed by at least 50% it’s held in the memory compression cache (10% of the memory is reserved for this). Otherwise it’s swapped to disk. Swapping is the last technology. If there is no more memory left and the other technologies are used up to their maximum, memory pages are swapped out to disk. Please note, that this is a very rough summary. For more information, please check VMware vSphere Resource Management Guide. With this techniques you can easily create four VMs with each 16 GB memory on a host with 32 GB memory. Important is, that the VMs can only allocate less then 32 GB memory, because the hypervisor also needs some memory for itself and virtualization overhead. A VM needs at least the amount of overhead memory to start on a VMware ESXi.
How does Microsoft Hyper-V manages its memory?
Until Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Microsoft Hyper-V was unable to do dynamic memory management. Only static memory allocation was possible. To stay with the example, it wasn’t possible to start four 16 GB VMs on a 32 GB host with Hyper-V. During the power-on, Hyper-V reserves the configured memory of the VM, which makes unused memory unavailable for other VMs. With Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Microsoft added dynamic memory management to Hyper-V. Since then you can enable dynamic memory on VM-level. After anabling it for a VM you can set a so called “Startup RAM”. This is the amount of memory which is assigned to the VM during startup. This is because Windows needs more memory during startup than the steady state (Source). It should be set to the amount of memory which is needed to run the server and application with the desired performance. You can also configure a “Minimum RAM”. This is the amount of memory up to which the hypervisor can reclaim memory using a ballooning technique. Because you can configure a “Minimum RAM”, you can also configure a “Maximum RAM”. This is the amount of memory up to which the hypervisor can add memory to the VM. And now comes the interesting part. Any idea how the hypervisor adds memory to the VM? No? He’s using memory hot-add! If the VMs needs more memory, it’s simply hot-added to the VM. This explains why the OS inside the VM has to support memory hot-add in the case you want to use dynamic memory. And it explains also why some applications are not supported with Hyper-V dynamic memory.
Conclusion
IMHO it’s not the dynamic memory managemet itself, which leads to Microsofts support statement. It’s the way how Microsoft Hyper-V manages the dynamic memory. Exchange checks the configured memory during the start of its services. If the memory size is increased after the start of the services, Exchange simply doesn’t recognizes it. On the other hand Microsoft SQL Server can profit from hot-added memory. Because of this, dynamic memory is supported with Microsoft SQL Server (check question 7 and answer 7 in the linked KB article). VMware ESXi doesn’t hot-add memory to a VM. Therefore you have to configure a suitable memory size. If you hot-add memory, then the same restrictions apply as for Hyper-V. Instead of relying on memory hot-add you can configure the suitable memory size when using VMware ESXi. But always remember: Memory oversubscription can lead to performance problems, if the VMs try to allocate the configured memory! Best practice is not to oversubscribe memory.
IMHO
Memory management in ESXi and Hyper-V strongly differs. There’s no better or worse. They are too different to compare and they are developed for different use cases.
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Analysis / Statistics (1 Service)
Anonymous evaluation for troubleshooting and further development
