Varrow Blogs

It’s often the case that we as IT engineers must work with several different technologies to configure an overall solution.  A prime example is Site Recovery Manager from VMware.  SRM requires skill sets mainly in virtualization and storage, but other peripheral requirements such as SQL for the configuration database broaden the expertise needed to setup [...]

The EMC storage viewer has always been a handy interface to peer into your VMware storage in the vcenter interface.  Due to depreciated changes in the plugin framework, this no longer works after update 1.  Rumor has it that version 2.1 of the plugin should be out any day now and this newer version should

The EMC storage viewer has always been a handy interface to peer into your VMware storage in the vcenter interface.  Due to depreciated changes in the plugin framework, this no longer works after update 1.  Rumor has it that version 2.1 of the plugin should be out any day now and this newer version should be fully compatible with Update 1. 

For more information on the EMC Storage Viewer, check out this article by Mr. Sakac:

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/04/where-to-get-the-emc-storage-viewer-vcenter-plugin.html

Zero data loss over any distance, excites me. But how, mister you? How can you speak of such pie in the sky jibber, when the laws of physic’s dictate otherwise? Easy..Axxana’s Phoenix System…

What is this exactly? The solution is simple. Synchronous replication equates to zero data loss but at the expense of geo locale DC’s, general distance limitations, increased bandwidth between sites, degradation of app performance, etc. Another wards its way exorbitant for most businesses but necessary for business’s requiring an RPO of zero. Asynchronous replication, on the other hand,  has no distance limitation, requires no specialized software or bandwidth requirements (per say) but data loss is inevitable. By combining the best of both technologies, Phoenix System along with EMC’s RecoverPoint creates zero data loss disaster recovery within asynchronous environments. The ideology around this is really quite profound and sure to change the landscape of disaster recovery, but don’t take my word for it.

To better understand how this works lets look at the individual components of said technology.

• RP Black Box-That’s right black box technology the same technology used in aviation flight recorders. Primary site positioned,  these little hardened bundles of joy are able to withstand varying degrees of harshness and devastation, such as..
  • Up to 2000 °F for an hour of direct flame, Up to 482 °F for 6 hours, 40G shock
    5000 lb of weight, 30 feet water pressure, Pierce force of 500 lb rod with cross-section of
    .042 dropped from 10 ft height. With the exception of nuclear attacks the black box, statistically, should cover most DC disasters.
• RP Collector-Primary site positioned. Now you’ll notice in the pic below, EMC’s RecoverPoint is used to facilitate not only async data replication from the local site to the remote but also synchronous replication to the Collector.  What type of data? Lag data. Data that is naturally associated with asynchronous data, but rather captured and stored within the Black Box. This lag data is stored and encrypted on 72G to 300G worth of flash memory. Note: protection via Phoenix can be defined on a per Consistency Group within RecoverPoint.
• RP Recoverer-Secondary site positioned. This, in short, is there purely for data recovery. In a such a situation, data is retrieved from the the black box via cellular broadband communication or by direct attachment of a laptop to the black box itself at the secondary site. This lag data is married up with the asynch data at the remote site  to provide a consistent copy of your protected data.

Now the last time I got this excited was during my early days with RecoverPoint, tis the core of my being I guess. Regardless, I’ve got my eye on you Axxana and I suspect there will be a lot of good to come from these brains within.

For more information please visit, http://www.axxana.com.

The Phoenix System Brochure, http://www.axxana.com/images/Phoenix_systemRP.pdf

The Economic Value of Axxana’s Zero Data Loss Solution, http://www.axxana.com/images/EconomicValue_ZeroDataLossSolut.pdf

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Zero data loss over any distance, excites me. But how, mister you? How can you speak of such pie in the sky jibber, when the laws of physic’s dictate otherwise? Easy..Axxana’s Phoenix System…
What is this exactly? The solution is simple. Synchronous replication equates to zero data loss but at the expense of geo locale DC’s, [...]

VMware released Update 1 for vSphere and vCenter this week.  Nothing truly Earth shattering but a few nice enhancements in theres:
vSphere Update 1

VMware View 4.0 support – Makes sense given the release of View 4.0.
Windows 7  and Windows 2008 R2 support – Again, timely update.
Enhanced Clustering Support for Windows Cluster – Not really adding anything [...]

What can I say, I just don’t have much to blog about this week and am struggling to find something worth talking about.  That being the case I thought I’d point out some new things that EMC has released in the past few weeks. 
For those of you doing backup to disk or storing lots of [...]

The following Windows operating systems support disks greater than 2TB:
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows Server 2003
Windows Vista
Windows Server 2008
But if you expect that your Windows disks will need to be extended beyond a particular partition size, care should be taken that you format the Windows partition with the anticipated cluster size or allocation unit size to [...]

I am currently working on a VMware vSphere project that is being built on Cisco UCS blades. The UCS blades have a single dual port CNA that acts as both an HBA and a 10G NIC. When we tried to apply the host profile built from our reference blade we got this error message “Error [...]

XenDesktop 4 is available today with FlexCast, HDX, and more.  Check out the Citrix Blog for more information:
http://community.citrix.com/display/ocb/2009/11/16/XenDesktop+4+is+here!

XenDesktop 4 is available today with FlexCast, HDX, and more.  Check out the Citrix Blog for more information:

http://community.citrix.com/display/ocb/2009/11/16/XenDesktop+4+is+here!

Symmetrix physical devices are configured into logical volumes called hypervolumes.  Hypervolumes are the unit of storage at which RAID protection is defined.  Open systems can have RAID 1 , RAID 5 or RAID 6 protection for Fixed Block Architecture (FBA) hypervolumes.  
Depending on the hardware configuration and the RAID type, a maximum of 512 hypervolumes are allowed [...]

That would be Data Domain  I’m talking about, so get your minds out of the gutter.   
Late last week we sat down with one of the local Data Domain technical guys to go through the new product line and dive a little deeper into the technical details and the feeds and speeds of the new products. Today [...]

Listed below is an interesting, free tool that I found on www.citrixtools.net which should help with day to day management of most XenApp environments.
http://www.citrixtools.net/en/Home/newsid374/386.aspx

So how many of you out there have been involved in or are responsible for ensuring that your company’s critical systems always remain online?  It’s a daunting task sometimes, who am I kidding almost all the time, but take heart as there are alternatives to a career of manual recovery exercises.  Even better, these options [...]