VMware Site Recovery Manager

VMware Site Recovery Manager 1.0 Released

June 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware has announced its new tool for disaster recovery management and automation of a virtual infrastructure, VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 1.0 (build 97878).

VMware SRM 1.0 is part of VMware’s suite of management and automation products for the datacenter, leverages virtualization to simplify business continuity planning and testing, and reduces the risk and complexity associated with executing disaster recovery.

“Effective disaster recovery has been a significant challenge for many organizations,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of products and solutions at VMware. “With the delivery of VMware Site Recovery Manager, VMware removes hurdles associated with disaster recovery planning and implementation. Through our innovative disaster recovery testing, management, and automation capabilities, we bring predictability back into the hands of IT and help eliminate risks associated with human error.”

Site Recovery Manager works seamlessly with VMware Infrastructure, VMware VirtualCenter, and replication software from storage partners to provide integrated disaster recovery management and automation. It provides:

Integrated management of disaster recovery plans. Create, update and document recovery plans directly from VMware VirtualCenter.
Non-disruptive testing of disaster recovery plans. Execute automated tests of recovery plans in an isolated testing environment using the recovery plan that would be used in an actual failover. Hardware configuration dependencies are eliminated and testing can occur without impacting production systems.
Automated failover and recovery. Automate execution of the recovery process, eliminating many of the slow and unreliable manual processes common in traditional disaster recovery.

VMware’s parent company, EMC, is one of the first vendors to officially announce support for Site Recovery Manager. Other vendors showing support for the product include 3Par, Dell, FalconStor Software, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, LeftHand Networks, and NetApp.

Pricing for Site Recovery Manager is based on the number of processors in the servers. SRM can be purchased as a standalone product or purchased as part of VMware’s Management and Automation Bundle which includes two-processor versions of VMware Site Recovery Manager, VMware Lifecycle Manager, and VMware Lab Manager or VMware Stage Manager. There’s also a trial version available for download.

INX Buys VMware Virtualization Consulting Organization AccessFlow

June 10, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

INX yesterday announced that it has acquired the operations of AccessFlow, a consulting organization focused on delivering VMware-based virtualization solutions.

AccessFlow is an award winning VMware Premier & Gold Certified VAC Partner and is one of the first VMware partners experienced in VMware’s new Site Recovery Manager product, expected to be available later this year. The company currently has 30 employees of which 17 are solutions engineers.

The acquisition closed on June 6, 2008, and was structured as a purchase of the ongoing operations of AccessFlow by INX. INX expects the transaction to be accretive to per-share earnings for the 12-month period following the transaction.

Last Week’s Virtualization Headlines

May 18, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

We apologize for the limited reporting of last week, and we just wanted to let you know we’re going to pick up our usual pace as of today. For now, these are the most apparent stories we came across with regards to what happened in virtualization land:

Virtual Iron and Surgient both lost key marketing executives. Mike Grandinetti, who had been working for Virtual Iron since 2003 (see our video interview with Mike at VMWorld Europe 2008), has moved on to become Managing Director of Southboro Capital, presumably his own venture. Similar story at Surgient, who saw the leave of VP of Marketing Erik Josowitz who had been with the start-up since 2004. No word on what Josowitz is up to next.
Quest Software reported (PDF) its 2008 Q1 results. Total revenues increased to $172.8 million compared to the prior year’s first quarter revenue of $149.8 million.
Parallels has updated Parallels Desktop to build 5600. With the update, the company has added full support for Windows Vista SP1, Windows XP SP3, and improved compatibility with the MacBook Air, along with some minor bugfixes and performance enhancements.
Stealth startup DynamicOps, a venture-funded spinout of management technology developed by Credit Suisse’s research and development organization, launched its virtual machine management application Virtual Resource Manager.
HP joined Desktone‘s Service Provider Partner Program.
VMware announced that VMware Site Recovery Manager, a product for disaster recovery management and automation, will be available for order this week with general availability expected to follow within 30 days. Both 3PAR and NetApp have already announced integration / support for VMware SRM.
Check Point Software Technologies announced the general availability of ZoneAlarm ForceField, which it claims to be a comprehensive, virtualized browser security solution.
AMD announced enterprise customers now have more choices for rack-mount and blade systems based upon Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors with the launch of six new servers from Sun Microsystems.
EMC could very well be planning to sell off all or part of its majority stake in VMware, a rumor spread by Bloomberg. EMC will be able to do a tax-free distribution of shares in January 2009, and some are already citing Intel as a potential acquirer of the assets.

Dell Gets Down & Busy With Virtualization

May 7, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

As expected, Dell today announced its broadest lineup of dedicated virtualization solutions ever. More than a dozen new servers, tools, and services aim to simplify the deployment and management of virtualization in enterprises of any size.

“Virtualization is quickly moving beyond hypervisors and hardware consolidation,” said Rick Becker, vice president of software and solutions, Dell Product Group. “Enterprises are looking for a broad array of servers, storage and services designed specifically for virtualized environments. Having been a leader in the first wave of virtualization, today we are signaling our intent to lead the second.”

Dell comes out with updated on-line tools, new e-commerce capability and expanded factory integration. With the updated Virtualization Advisor tool, customers have more options for building validated configurations online for virtualization deployments before purchase.

Through Dell.com/VMwareNow, customers can now upgrade PowerEdge servers purchased with VMware ESXi 3.5 to full VMware Infrastructure 3 enterprise licensing in a single click. Dell will also offer in coming weeks factory integrated VMware ESXi 3.5 or Citrix XenServer Dell Express Edition across a broad range of PowerEdge servers, including the PowerEdge 2950, R900, 1950, 2900, M600 blade and M605 blade.

The PowerEdge R805 offers 2X the memory and I/O capacity of Dell’s previous generation 2 socket servers. With a choice of VMware ESXi 3.5 or Citrix XenServer Dell Express Edition integrated hypervisors, the PowerEdge R805 and R905 servers can deliver the optimal platform for virtualized environments.

Dell EqualLogic storage arrays offer new advanced SAN-aware integration with VMware Site Recovery Manager for data protection and disaster recovery for virtualized environments at no additional cost in management tools.

Dell and Egenera are making virtualization and data center automation a reality beyond the blade chassis. The Dell PAN system is built on PowerEdge 1950 and 2950 servers and Dell/EMC storage, with Citrix XenServer and factory integrated as a complete, turn-key solution that consolidates and virtualizes server compute-resources into an entire Processor Area Network to be managed like hard drives in a SAN. The Dell PAN system can deliver rapid provisioning and re-deployment “in minutes”.

Dell today announced the expansion of its virtualization services to include:

Virtualization Simplification Workshop – for customers looking to determine which options are the most suitable for their specific business needs today, their technical environment and to meet future growth.
New Virtualization Operational Assessment and Process Automation accelerates selection of the right virtualization technology for their needs and define processes and tools to automate the management of virtualized environments.
New Virtualization Healthcheck – reviews existing virtualized production environments to identify technology, process and people issues impeding virtualization scale out and provides an actionable, results oriented plan.
Expanded Virtualization Assessment – taking into account multi-vendor virtualization considerations, advanced storage options, as well as green IT data center energy efficiency improvements.
Dell PAN Accelerator Service – integrating a full Processing Area Network within the customer environment to help ensure production readiness.
Expanded Design and Implementation Services – which features the latest Virtualization technologies, in addition to best-of-breed disaster recovery tools and techniques.
ProSupport Remote Advisory Services – fast access to technical experts for consulting on virtualization implementations.

These offerings are available today from Dell Global Infrastructure Consulting Services.