In reading the SRM 5 release notes I came across an interesting and unexpected limitation that may reduce the viability of VMware Replication for some customers:

Large Disks Perform Full Sync Unnecessarily

When disks larger than 256GB are protected using vSphere Replication (VR), any operation that causes an internal restart of the virtual disk device causes the disk to complete a full sync. Internal restarts occur any time:

• A virtual machine is restarted
• A virtual machine is vMotioned
• A virtual machine is reconfigured
• A snapshot is taken of a virtual machine
• Replication is paused and resumed

The full sync is initiated by ESX, and any resolution to this issue would involve an update to ESX. These syncs involve additional I/O to both the protected and recovery site disks, which often takes longer than the Recovery Point Objective (RPO), resulting in a missed RPO target. To avoid this issue, use smaller disks.

Versions of VMware Site Recover Manager (SRM) prior to version 5 required array-based replication and a VMware-certified Storage Replication Adapter to be installed in order to function.  SRM itself did not perform replication.

VMware SRM 5 now includes an optional replication feature with the following characteristics:

• vSphere Replication (VR) is included with SRM 5 for free but array-based replication is still supported
• VR offers a cost-effective means of protecting 2^nd and 3^rd tier applications  and remote offices
• VR is not intended to replace SAN-based replication for mission-critical applications
• VR requires version 5 of vCenter and SRM but ESX host versions can vary

Additional VR Characteristics:

• Adds native replication to SRM
• Replication is enabled per VM, not per datastore, and can include some or all of the VM’s disks
• VMs can be replicated regardless of the underlying storage – even to or from local storage on a host!
• Supports Microsoft VSS for guest OS quiescing
• Initial copy of VM can be seeded by online replication or by transporting external media
• Replicated disks can be placed anywhere at the recovery site
• Replication is managed via the vCenter console
• Changes on the source disk are tracked by ESXi and only deltas are sent to the remote site
• Replication does not use VMware snapshots – very nice!
• RPO is configurable between 15 minutes and 24 hours

VR Limitations:

• Focus is on virtual disks of powered-on VMs
• VR works at the virtual device layer
• FT, linked clone, templates not supported
• Automated fallback of VMs not supported in the initial release
• Virtual hardware 7 or later required in VM

VR Use Cases:

• Site-to-site (async) for SMB customers where no SAN replication is available
• Alongside array replication (compliments rather than replaces)
• Remote offices to existing paired SRM datacenters in a hub & spoke model
• DR as a Service (DRaaS) provider model, eliminating the need for a dedicated customer-owned secondary site up to a 10:1 ratio
• Planned VM migration between sites

Join us for these complimentary webcasts with live Q&A. Click on a title for more details and to register!

January 18th: Introduction to Virtualization

This webcast is designed for those with little to no virtualization experience to understand why virtualization and VMware are so important to driving down both capital and operational costs. Hear about key concepts and technologies of virtualization, including the VMware vSphere® Hypervisor and VMware vSphere 5, the world’s most robust and complete virtualization platform. This session will also introduce the new vSphere Storage Appliance and VMware GO, two solutions that are making it easier than ever to get started with virtualization

January 24th: Simplifying Disaster Protection for All Your Applications with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager and VMware vSphere Replication

Traditional disaster recovery solutions are often expensive, complex and unreliable to meet business requirements. As a result, IT departments are hesitant to expand disaster protection beyond their most critical applications. With VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager 5 (SRM), the market-leading disaster recovery product, all types of organizations can deploy the simplest, most reliable disaster protection and site migration. Bundled with VMware vSphere® Replication, the first hypervisor based replication technology, SRM reduces the cost of disaster recovery protection for small and large companies, enabling them to expand their disaster protection to all applications. Even single sites can now use SRM to leverage the cloud services offered by eGroup.

January 26th: Top 10 Myths About Virtualizing Business-Critical Applications

Although the benefits of virtualization are well established, some companies have stopped short of virtualizing their business-critical applications. Uncover the truth about how you can virtualize business-critical applications and achieve benefits such as faster migration to new hardware and faster application upgrades.

Questions? Please e-mail the VMware Online Events team, or call eGroup at 1.877.eGROUP.1.

Recently I worked with a customer that who was experiencing some odd spam false positive behavior. Even though they had purchased and deployed a third-party spam filter, Exchange was still evaluating each piece of mail and moving suspected spam emails into each user’s Junk Mail folder. This was considered undesired behavior. Any mail that made it past the third-party spam filtering appliance was to be treated as known-good.

Unfortunately you can’t simply disable the native Exchange spam filter, but you can achieve equivalent behavior. Here’s how:

Examine the email headers on a piece of false-positive spam (in Outlook 2010, File -> Properties -> Internet Headers) and note the value of the X-MS-Exchange-Organization-SCL line. In this case, the value was 9 (out of a possible 9) meaning Exchange had analyzed the email and determined (with a high degree of confidence) that it was spam.

Launch the Exchange Management Shell (it’s Powershell for Exchange). It should connect to your Exchange server automatically. Run Get-OrganizationConfig and note the value of the SCLJunkThreshold line. This value determines the maximum spam rating that is allowed to go straight to a user’s mailbox. Mail with a higher rating will go to the Junk Mail folder instead. This field accepts a maximum value of 9, so if we set it to 9 we will effectively tell Exchange to trust all incoming mail.

Run Set-OrganizationConfig -scljunkthreshold 9 (where 9 is the new value that you want the server to trust).

You can view the new value has taken effect by re-running Get-OrganizationConfig.

There’s no need to run this command on each Exchange server – just run it once on any server and it replicates to other mail servers in the organization.

• Force Classic Control Panel
• As a geek, the first time I open the Control Panel on a Windows 7 or Server 2008/R2 VM, I reach up to that “View by: Category” dropdown and change it to “View by: Small icons” so that I can see all the control panel icons at once. This GPO sets that to the default view for all users.
• User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Control Panel\Always open All Control Panel items
• No Ctrl+Alt+Del
• This turns off the “Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to logon” prompt and saves you from having to reach for Ctrl+Alt+Ins when you’re logging in within the vSphere Client.
• Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\Security Options\Disable CTRL+ALT+DEL requirement for logon
• No Initial Setup or Server Management
• If you use the Initial Setup or Server Management dialogs to help you setup your servers, you’ll want to skip this GPO. I normally close them as soon as they appear (and they reappear for every new user on the system). If it takes half of a second to close each one, just think of how many dozens of seconds this could potentially save me over the course of a lifetime <sarcasm>.
• Computer Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\System\Server Manager\Do not display Initial Configuration Tasks window automatically at logon
• Computer Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\System\Server Manager\Do not display Server Manager automatically at logon

What group policies do you use to keep things simple?

New pricing for Veeam Backup & Replication v6 goes into effect February 1, 2012. If you’ve been considering buying Veeam now is a great time to do it!

Until Feb. 1, 2012, new customers can purchase version 6 and current customers can purchase additional sockets, prepaid maintenance or renew support, all at current pricing!

Call your eGroup account representative or email sales@eGroup-us.com to order today!

* All prices are MSRP (manufacturer suggested retail price) per CPU socket for tier A licenses.

NetWorker for VMware provides an alternate client backup technology for virtual machines in conjunction with vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) technology from VMware.

VADP helps to perform backups from a VADP backup proxy server, which can be a physical or virtual machine, using the VMware snapshot technique (A point in time copy of the virtual machine). VADP can be used with a vCenter Server.

The following are advantages of VADP backup and recovery:

• VADP backups offload backup processes from the ESX server to a VADP proxy server.
• Eliminates the need for a backup window by using VMware virtual machine snapshot technology.
• Supports file level backups with incremental and differentials for virtual machines running Microsoft Windows guest operating system.
• Supports image level backups for virtual machines running any guest operating system supported by VMware.
• Supports the ability to recover individual files from an image level backup (Windows NTFS only).
• Supports deduplication across virtual machines and servers.
• Backup impact on the target virtual machine and other virtual machines hosted on the same server is minimized.
• There is no need to install NetWorker software on each virtual machine.
• Provides LAN-Free backup because the VADP proxy server can be connected to the SAN through a fibre channel adapter.
• Advanced VMware features and configurations like Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) and VMotion do not have any impact on the performance of NetWorker.