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XLink Technology Releases proReplicator 3.0

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XLink Technology announces today the new release of proReplicator 3.0 for Windows 2008/2003/2000/XP systems.

Product Overview: Xlink proReplicator brings data replication to a whole new level, combining both real-time and scheduled data replication for all your mission critical servers. Whether you are concerned about virtual machine backup, database, email or web server continuous data protection (CDP) and disaster recovery, proReplicator will provide a consolidated solution for your enterprise. Data replication in proReplicator could be implemented either scheduled or in real-time, locally or remotely, over LAN or WAN.

Feature Highlights:

  • Manual Failover / Failback, Test-Data on demand with one mouse click. With a very simple user interface, it is only one mouse click to test data on replicas or get system failover / failback between the Primary and a replica.
  • Scheduled or Real-time replication for entire VMware guest OS. Once you go to a virtual environment, you have to look at the virtual machine and make sure that you back it up the same way you do your physical system. It is always necessary to continuously replicate application data from multiple virtual production servers to another backup server either locally or over the WAN, for fully disaster recovery in the event of an outage.

Xlink ProReplicator can be installed on the host OS or a guest OS of VMware server, replicating from the host OS offers not only the benefit of replicating all applications running on the virtual machine(e.g. Exchange server, SQL database server, IIS web server, or file server), but also replicating non-Windows guest OS (e.g. Linux or Solaris x86).

  • Real-time and Application-aware data replication for MSSQL database and IIS web servers. Default replication templates provided for MS SQL database server and IIS web server. User self-defined templates are also supported.
  • Scheduled Automatic Replication. Flexible scheduling allows you to run automatic replication jobs instead of, or in addition to, the Real-Time replication.
  • Scheduled or Real-time data replication to local and remote target locations. ProReplicator provides local and/or remote protection against almost any outage, you can replicate to a disaster recovery site as far away from your production server as you wish.

Key Benefits:

  • One-stop solution for server continuous data protection and disaster recovery.
  • True CDP technology for point-in-time data protection, guarantee database and major applications recoverability.
  • Application-aware data replication to reduce unwanted garbage files.
  • Provides local and/or remote protection against almost any outage, you can replicate to a disaster recovery site as far away from your production server as you wish.
  • Minimization of network bandwidth usage: Real-time replication copies only the modified portion of a file. ProReplicator monitors byte-level change in data. At time of saving them into disk devices, it speeds up performance by using block-level CDP to match disk block IO operations.
  • Data Replication on database and non-database files, as well as dynamically generated Registry Files: The Registry Replication feature meets the needs of some server systems that require certain dynamically changed key definitions of registry matched on the Secondary server for a successful failover.
  • Easy setup and centralized configuration on Primary Master Station

Support Platforms:

  • Supports VMware
  • Supports SQL 2000, 2005 and 2008 and SQLExpress
  • Supports Windows 2008/2003 32-bit and 64-bit, Windows 2000/XP
  • No need for the cost/complexity of the Microsoft clustering
  • No system reboot required on installation

Ex-Microsoft Exec Richard McAniff Appointed Chief Development Officer, Executive VP At VMware

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VMware today announced that Richard McAniff has been named Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer. McAniff will report directly to President and Chief Executive Officer Paul Maritz. In his new role, McAniff will be responsible for research and development across VMware’s Server and Desktop Business Units.

“I am pleased to welcome Richard to VMware at a time when the company is poised to expand its technology leadership even farther ahead with its upcoming VMware vSphere generation of products,” said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer, VMware. “As the new leader of our R&D organization, Richard brings deep experience in developing industry-leading software. He will play a crucial role in driving product engineering efforts that will help drive and grow our business.”

McAniff, 59, brings more than 28 years of software development leadership experience to VMware. Most recently, he spent 21 years at Microsoft. As corporate vice president for Microsoft Office, McAniff was responsible for several major software tools including Excel and Access. He also oversaw the Business Intelligence effort within Office and development of Web components for the SharePoint Portal Server. In addition, McAniff helped guide the development of Office 2000, Office XP, Office 2003 and Office 2007. Before serving as corporate vice president, McAniff served as general manager of the Visual Basic development system. Prior to joining Microsoft in 1987, McAniff was a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. During his seven years there, he worked on numerous projects including probability analyses for alternative fuels.

McAniff holds a master’s degree in systems and industrial engineering from the University of Arizona, a master’s degree in resource economics from the University of Massachusetts, and a bachelor of science degree in economics from the University of Massachusetts.

Oh yeah, he also seems to be spending quite some time on Twitter.

Veeam Debuts New Versions Of Reporter And Reporter Enterprise Products

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Veeam Software, award-winning provider of systems management tools for VMware virtual datacenter environments, today delivers new executive management reporting, integration with corporate CMDBs (change management databases), new change management capabilities, and numerous technical enhancements in version 3.5 of its Veeam Reporter and Veeam Reporter Enterprise products. Veeam Reporter is a favorite of virtualization consultants and systems integrators for documenting customer engagements. Veeam Reporter Enterprise is ideal for documenting large ESX and ESXi environments over time for capacity planning and chargeback.

New features in Reporter Enterprise 3.5 include:
  • Executive Management Reporting — documentation of the virtual environment looks better than ever, with new Visio diagram formats, new pre-defined reports, and a new ability to create and save custom report templates, including corporate logo and formatting.
  • CMDB Integration — provides integration of the VMware environment into common configuration management processes by exporting data into an existing centralized CMDB. Reporter Enterprise 3.5 provides a new PowerShell Extension to run scripts to automatically export Virtual Infrastructure data (both for the current state and earlier points in time) into a company’s centralized CMDB. This eliminates the manual work of     creating inventory spreadsheets, and keeps the central CMDB up-to-date automatically. In addition, running PowerShell scripts against the Reporter Enterprise server instead of vCenter allows users to offload script     processing activities from vCenter, providing for better availability of this critical Virtual Infrastructure element.
  • Change Management — because Veeam Reporter Enterprise gathers virtual infrastructure data periodically on a scheduled basis and stores it in a central Microsoft SQL database, administrators can see point-in-time views  or generate reports to analyze changes over time for configuration drift, security auditing and troubleshooting. In addition or instead of that, administrators can simply opt to receive an e-mail with all changes to the virtual infrastructure since the last data collection.

Veeam Reporter Enterprise 3.5 is available immediately, with North American pricing at $375 USD per socket.

AMD demonstrates live migration across three generations of CPUs

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AMD today released video and images of Live Migration (VMotion) across three generations of processors. Thanks to AMD-V Extended Migration instructions in the latest generations of CPUs, combined with VMware’s Enhanced VMotion Compatibility feature (released with ESX 3.5 Update 2 last summer) AMD is able to migrate machines running on 65-nm hardware from yesteryear to the latest six-core Opteron “Istanbul” line of processors, yet to be released. VMotion/live migration compatibility is a key in creating future-proof computing clusters running VMware or other virtualization software.

Check out the YouTube video:

AMD Istanbul live migration demo

Intel provides the same functionality under the moniker “FlexMigration”, that allows VMotion to the latest Nehalem CPUs from Xeon 5200 (“Wolfdale/Penryn”) and newer.

Karma Koala

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With all the fuzz around Cannes.. oh wait .. nothing happened there.. that was the most boring event ever wasn’t it … we forgot to focus on where the real action is happening …

When the 9.10 Ubuntu Release, Karmic Koala, hits the wire it will be Cloud Ready or Virtualization ready or whatever you want to call it. Ubuntu wants to keep Open Source and Free software where it belongs, the key components of Cloud Computing. We have to agree that it are the Open Source Hypervisors that are the being used in the fundaments of Cloud Computing.

Ubuntu will be embracing the API’s of Amazon EC2 and will make it easier for every body to build their own Private Clouds using Open Source tools. Ubuntu-vmbuilder allows you to create a custom AMI , however they also provide a set of standard images to be used. Apart from deploying Ubuntu instances on the existing clouds, Karma Koala will live very happy in his favourite Eucalyptus trees

In Plain English, Ubuntu has recently welcomed the Eucalyptus framework in it’s software repositories, and it will be part of the upcoming release 9.4 already. (Eucalyptus being the open-source infrastructure for implementing Elastic Cloud computing using computing clusters which has an interface-compatible that is with Amazon.com’s EC2 which we covered earlier)

Now if you remember Ubuntu was one of the first Linux distributions to go for KVM rather than Xen, given its desktop-oriented nature. Amazon build it’s infrastructure on Xen. So Originally Eucalyptus was a mostly Xen supporting Framework, but lots of things have changed and today Eucalyptus supports both Xen, KVM and VMWare mostly using LibVirt, making it hypervisor-agnostic.

Cloud Company Zimory Adds Support For VMware ESX Server

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Deutsche Telekom spinoff Zimory recently announced support for VMware’s ESX Server – extending the company’s advanced cloud technology to enterprise applications.

Zimory Enterprise Cloud combines existing virtual servers into a homogeneous, flexible, computing cloud – enabling data center managers to move applications quickly within single or multiple (on- and off-premises) locations. The technology enables very fast deployments of multiple virtual machines from an on- to an off-premises data center. Zimory now supports Xen and all flavors of VMWare. 

Zimory Enterprise Cloud optimizes data centers by increasing the efficiency of existing resources. Zimory begins where server virtualization ends: Zimory combines virtual servers into a single homogeneous computing cloud. Depending on current resource requirements, users can move applications quickly within a data center as well as between various locations — the optimal choice to temporarily distribute workloads.

Zimory management solutions enable businesses to make server resources available to other internal departments — in a controlled way and a finite amount of time – and allow quantification of this utilization even at the application level.

Announced last month, Zimory Public Cloud provides companies of all sizes instant, easy and flexible access to external computing power worldwide while also enabling businesses with excess server capacity to offer their resources to businesses around the world.

Zimory Public Cloud for sellers aggregates available server computing capacity from around the world and makes it available through an Internet trading platform. Using Zimory Public Cloud, companies looking for computing resources can buy capacity quickly — as needed — without long-term contractual commitment. Zimory handles pricing, contracts, security, virtual machine migration and billing.