A few days ago the voting was opened for this year’s voting. By voting you can show your appreciation for all the effort bloggers have taken to inform you about features, issues, design questions, news, developments etc etc. Voting is very easy and will just take a few minutes of your time. Just select ten of your favourite blog sites and rank them 1 to 10. Then select the best site in a couple of categories and you are done. All voters will be entered into a random drawing to win copies of TrainSignal’s excellent vSphere 5 and View 5 training courses.

Please vote using this link. UP2V (Marcel van den Berg) is listed in the middle column, almost at the end.   

I found an article on microsoft.com titled The Cluster service stops unexpectedly on a Windows Server 2008 R2 failover cluster node when you perform multiple backup operations in parallel on a cluster shared volume

The article describes a hotfix which needs to be applied when running either Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1).
Read the article here.
We applied the hotfix and the problem was fixed!

What’s Included in the vCenter Operations Management Suite?

• VMware vCenter Operations Manager
  VMware vCenter Operations Manager uses patented analytics
  and an integrated approach to operations management to
  provide the intelligence and visibility needed to proactively
  ensure service levels, optimum resource usage and configuration
  compliance in dynamic virtual and cloud environments.
• VMware vCenter Configuration Manager
  VMware vCenter Configuration Manage automates
  configuration management across virtual and physical servers
  and desktops, increasing efficiency by eliminating manual,
  error-prone and time-consuming work. This enables
  enterprises to maintain continuous compliance by detecting
  changes and comparing them to configuration and security
  policies.
• VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator
  VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator automatically discovers
  and visualizes application and infrastructure dependencies. It
  provides visibility into the application services running over the
  virtual-machine infrastructure and their interrelationships for
  day-to-day operational management
• VMware vCenter Chargeback Manager
  VMware vCenter Chargeback Manager enables accurate cost measurement, analysis and reporting of virtual machines, providing visibility into the actual cost of the virtual infrastructure required to support business services.

vCenter Operations Manager  delivers information on three metrics:

• Health describes the current behavior of the environment and any problems that need to be addressed immediately. Health is composed of workload, anomalies and faults.  Workload is a measure of how hard the VM is working relative to the resources it wants and what it is entitled to using. Anomalies is an expression of the number of metrics trending above or below normal which is a leading indicator of upcoming performance problems, and faults is the number of “hard” thresholds that have been crossed when there is an availability issue or a hardware failure has occurred.
• Risk describes the potential for future problems. Risk combines scores for time and capacity remaining before resources are exhausted. Risk also includes a new metric for stress which shows patterns of chronic strain. For example, during certain times of the week, there is more demand for resources in one cluster while other clusters are at or below capacity. You can use this information to optimize VM placement or to pre-allocated resources ahead of time.
• Efficiency is a new super metric to describe optimal utilization of resources. Efficiency includes scores of reclaimable waste, such as idle, over- and under-provisioned VMs, and VM density.  VM density shows current consolidation ratio vs maximum possible ratio without performance degradation.

Pricing and Availability
The updated VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite is available in four editions (Standard, Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus) to meet the IT operations needs of customers of all sizes – from small and midsized businesses (SMBs) to large enterprises.  List prices start at $50 per VM.  Updates are also available as a free upgrade for current VMware vCenter Operations customers. For more information, visit http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-operations/buy.html

See this video in which Kit Colbert (VMware architect) gives an overview of the VMware vCenter Operations Manager.

VMware vCenter Operations Suite 5.0 is Now Available…and Can Accelerate Your Private Cloud & Virtualization of Business Critical Apps
VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.0 now available

New VMware VCenter Ops Suite Geared More Toward Managers

The AWS Storage Gateway’s virtual machine (VM) must be installed on a host with the following minimum requirements:

VMWare ESXi Hypervisor (v4.1).
4 Virtual Processors assigned to the VM.
7.5GB of RAM assigned to the VM.
75GB of disk space for .ova installation and system data.
The AWS Storage Gateway currently supports mounting of its storage volumes using either the Microsoft Windows or Red Hat iSCSI Software Initiators.

The use case will mainly be the ability to store backup data in the cloud. Instead of buying storage for archiving and backup this can be leased from Amazon. Another use case will be Disaster Recovery as a Service or DRaaS. Snapshots of on-premises data can be replicated to Amazon cloud service. If the on-premises infrastructure is not available the data can be made available in the cloud using Amazon infrastructure.

More information here. Also a lot of information on the site titled StorageIOblog.com

Amazon fuses your storage system with its cloud at Gigaom.com

The AWS Storage Gateway – Integrate Your Existing On-Premises Applications with AWS Cloud Storage at Amazon Web Services Blog

VMware is currently running a promotion. You will get a free VCP5 exam voucher (worth Euro 208) when you register and attend the What’s New course.  Mind : Applicable ONLY for EMEA & Americas VMware-delivered Classes

Below are the details of the promotion that need to be met in order to qualify for the free VCP5 exam voucher:

1. Attend VMware vSphere: What’s New 5 delivered by VMware Education
   Between January 16 and February 24, 2012, register for and attend a VMware-delivered, VMware vSphere: What’s New 5 class in the Americas or EMEA.
   • VMware vSphere: What’s New 5 Direct-delivery Full Schedule in the Americas
   • VMware vSphere: What’s New 5 Direct-delivery Schedule in EMEA

Remember! Only VMware-delivered classes registered for and attended between January 16 and February 24, 2012 qualify for this promotion. No exceptions.

2. Upon completion of your class, you will receive an email from VMware Certification with your exam voucher code
3. Register to take the VCP5 Exam on or before February 29, 2012, using your FREE VCP5 exam voucher.

Please be aware that VMware vSphere: What’s New [V5.0] meets the course pre-requisite if you are already hold a VCP3 and only until March 1, 2012, when the pre-requisite changes. If you hold a VCP4, there is no pre-requisite until March 1. And, if you currently do not hold a VCP certification or hold only a VCP2, the VMware vSphere: What’s New [V5.0] course does not meet the course requirement. Visit VMware Certification for more information on VMware Certified Professional on vSphere 5.

*Terms and Conditions This VCP5 free exam voucher offer applies only to VMware vSphere: What’s New 5 delivered directly by VMware in EMEA and the Americas. This offer cannot be applied to partner-delivered courses, only applies to new registrations and cannot be combined with other offers. Enrollment is subject to availability and registration is on a “first come, first served” basis. VMware reserves the right to cancel a class. These terms and conditions are subject to change without notice.

Qualifying registrations for VMware vSphere: What’s New 5 must be received and fulfilled by VMware between January 16 and February 24, 2012. The VCP5 exam must be taken by the expiration date of March 1, 2012. Vouchers cannot be extended, replaced or used in combination with other offers. This promotion is not available on the Academic pricelist

Maritz said that the competitive environment with Microsoft, Red Hat, and Citrix had not changed appreciably in 2011, but he said that VMware expected for Windows Server 8 and Hyper-V 3 to come out later this year and take a run at VMware.”We’re expecting them to come back at us again, and we’re prepared for that,” Maritz said of his former employer

Server virtualization juggernaut VMware has busted through its first billion dollar quarter, beating Wall Street estimates for the fourth quarter of 2011 in both sales and profits.

Anyone – this means you, Red Hat, Citrix Systems, and Microsoft – that thinks they can knock out VMware in server virtualization should consider this: VMware’s virtual server business now rivals the revenue stream that IBM gets from its Power Systems and System z mainframe physical server businesses (individually), is roughly the same size as the systems business at Oracle, and is larger than the Itanium-based server business at HP.

Continue at source.

VMware annouced in September 2011 that the Hands-on Labs will be available for everyone  with an expected release at January 2012.

The Virtual Customer Labs service will initially be available for trial in the northeast of the USA. Software provided for testing by customers are vCloud Director, vCenter Operations Manager and Site Recovery Manager.  

More information in an article titled VMware previews cloud-based customer lab at NEVMUG on techtarget.com

The ability to create a point in time state of a virtual machine (also known as a snapshot or checkpoint ) is one of the advantages of virtual machines. After creation of a snapshot, the original virtual disk is made read only and all addional writes are written to a snapshot file (or delta file).
Snapshots are NOT a way to make backups for virtual machine. Snapshots are usefull to temporary save the state of the virtual machine before applying a patch or other software change. After the update has bee applied do not wait too long before deletion of the snapshot.

Hyper-V 2.0 part of Windows Server 2008 has a nasty issue/design flaw. When a snapshot file was deleted by the administrator, it was actually not immediately merged  with the original virtual disk and then deleted from disk.
It was merged and deleted only after a reboot was performed. Not everyone was aware of the ‘by design’ behaviour. It could easily lead to a volume running out of free disk space and a paused state of virtual machines. Read more about this at vcritical.com .
Virtual machine snapshots of Hyper-V 2.0 virtual machines are supported in production environments, but not recommended according to this posting on msdn.com.

Microsoft fixed this issue in Hyper-V 3.0. The feature called Live VHD Merge will make sure the snapshot file is merged and deleted from disk without the need for a reboot!

While Microsoft Windows Datacenter Edition and System Center suite is licensed per phyical CPU on the host, VMware tooling which enables to run a private cloud has a more complex licensing schema based on number of physical CPU’s and assigned virtual RAM (vSphere) and number of virtual machines to be managed.

Microsoft released a whitepaper titled ” Microsoft Private Cloud A comparative look at Functionality, Benefits, and Economics ” in January 2012 explaining the tooling of System Center 2012 and their licensing compared to the VMware tooling.

StarWind Software Inc. is launching a new contest: write a scenario for StarWind iSCSI SAN use in your production environment.

If you have had some great results in a range of complex IT challenges including: Virtualization, Windows Server Clustering, Shared Storage for Server Applications, Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery from using StarWind storage solutions then you are eligible for a fantastic prize from us.

Thus, StarWind is doing something exclusive that will make it worth your while.

If your Scenario is selected, you win a prize. Send your Scenario before midnight on Friday, March 30, 2012, and you’ll go in the draw to win iPad 2. Given the short time frame of this contest your odds of winning are in fact incredibly high.

All you need is:

• Submit an application letter
• Get preapproval from the StarWind Marketing Team
• Design and layout the Scenario
• See already published examples here

Requirements and rules:

• All scenario applications should be submitted to StarWind Marketing Team by March 30, 2012.
• Entries should be submitted, electronically, in Microsoft Word format or PDF format.
• Scenarios must clearly state the end-customer’s problem and how StarWind solution(s) helped to overcome it. They should reflect:
     - The company’s profile, specialization, scale and seriousness of problems it came up with
     - The way StarWind solutions have helped a customer to address the problem
• Participants allow all information provided for public use.
• All scenarios should be sent in English.
• Submissions will be also judged on the following criteria:
     - Innovation
     - Value to the IT community
     - Ease of understanding
     - Practicality

Click here to send us your scenario.

New StarWind iSCSI SAN v5.8 and Hyper-V Backup Plug-in are a New Level of Data Protection

Burlington, MA – January 13, 2012 – StarWind Software Inc., an innovative provider of SAN software for iSCSI storage and VM Backup technology, today announced the release of new StarWind iSCSI SAN v5.8 and Hyper-V Backup Plug-in. The iSCSI SAN software is enhanced by the powerful VM Backup technology that is included as a plug-in.

Backup plug-in is built specifically for Hyper-V-based environments to provide fast backup and restore for Hyper-V virtual machines. The backup solution delivered by StarWind performs all operations on the Hyper-V host level thus it requires no backup agents to be installed on virtual machines (Agentless Architecture).

Hyper-V Backup Plug-in makes fast backups and allows quick, reliable restore of both virtual machines and individual files. It utilizes advanced technologies for maximum disk space saving (Global Deduplication). This backup tool is integrated with StarWind Centralized Management Console that enables managing backup and storage from a single window.

Additionally, a new version of HA plug-in is presented in StarWind iSCSI SAN v5.8 that allows use of raw basic images to create HA targets. A new replication engine based on own technology instead of MS iSCSI transport creates higher performance and reliability. This new engine permits use of multiple network interfaces for synchronization and heartbeat.

To simplify the replacement of equipment and recovery from fatal failures, StarWind Software has implemented the ability to change the partner node to any other StarWind server on the fly, without any downtime. Synchronization engine is improved, and this version allows both nodes to sync automatically even in the case of a full blackout of both servers.

“With the release of StarWind iSCSI SAN v5.8 our company is happy to provide our customers with highly available storage and fast backup software developed by the same vendor,” said Artem Berman, Chief Executive Officer of StarWind Software. “Now small and medium-sized companies have an opportunity to achieve higher performance and absolute data protection.”

About StarWind Software Inc.
StarWind Software is a global leader in storage management and SAN software for small and midsize companies. StarWind’s flagship product is SAN software that turns any industry-standard Windows Server into a fault-tolerant, fail-safe iSCSI SAN. StarWind iSCSI SAN is qualified for use with VMware, Hyper-V, XenServer and Linux and Unix environments. StarWind Software focuses on providing small and midsize companies with affordable, highly availability storage technology which previously was only available in high-end storage hardware. Advanced enterprise-class features in StarWind include Automated HA Storage Node Failover and Failback (High Availability), Replication across a WAN, CDP and Snapshots, Thin Provisioning and Virtual Tape management.

Since 2003, StarWind has pioneered the iSCSI SAN software industry and is the solution of choice for over 30,000 customers worldwide in more than 100 countries and from small and midsize companies to governments and Fortune 1000 companies.

For more information on StarWind Software Inc., visit: www.starwindsoftware.com

How To Improve Disaster Recovery Preparedness  CIO.com
Most enterprises claim they fully exercise their disaster recovery plans at least once per year, however, evidence suggests that the majority of these exercises are not comprehensive and thorough; enterprises often just exercise a portion of the plan or a subset of applications. Here are10 best practices for updating and improving your current disaster recovery exercise program.

Disaster recovery planning in European organizations at Continuity Central
Over half of small organizations across the UK, France and Germany are operating without a formal disaster recovery plan in place, according to research from analyst firm Freeform Dynamics, sponsored by Quest Software.

Disaster Recovery is your transitional Cloud step at ZDnet.com
The Cloud is a much feared entity but it shouldn’t be. Fear of the Cloud can cost you a lot of money and can cost you a lot of money in downtime.

Replication over WAN: Your DR is only as Good as Your Last Packet at zerto.com
Recovering data quickly in the event of an emergency is inherently dependent on your network.  Replication simply won’t work if the WAN links connecting production and DR sites are down or weak.  As the discussion around DR moves to an “always-on” approach, where replication RTO/ RPO targets are minutes and even seconds, networks are feeling the heat.

VMware’s Gaetan Castelein: Transitioning to Disaster Avoidance at readwriteweb.com
The evolution of VMware’s disaster recovery guidance for customers is taking it in a direction that is actually less focused on the disaster itself, and more on business continuity. That’s changing the very economics of disaster recovery (DR) software, according to VMware infrastructure product manager Gaetan Castelein.

Storage and DR take virtualization center stage in 2012 at SearchServerVirtualization
Disaster recovery (DR) is a perennial “New Year’s resolution” for the IT industry, but new advancements in virtualization technology have observers hoping that 2012 will really be the year DR comes to the masses.

No More Excuses for Not Having Disaster Recovery in the Cloud at itbusinessedge.com
Disaster recovery in cloud environments is emerging as one of the must-have tools now that enterprises are looking for more than just massively scalable data repositories.

This is a Virtual Storage Appliance which can be used to study the management of NetApp using ONTAP.

Julian Wood wrote an excellent article on how to configure the simulator. Well worth the read if you want to learn about the NetApp storage.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 130,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 6 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

The key to protection of your virtualization investments is one solution with a rich feature set developed to help you achieve your IT goals easily. It is ONE ultimate answer to all your storage and data managing needs.

StarWind iSCSI SAN 5.8 provides:

Hyper-V Backup Plug-in

·         Agentless Architecture
·         Backups stored in VHD format
·         Global Deduplication
·         Single-click Backup

iSCSI Storage

·       100% stability and uptime
·       High Availability / Automatic Failover
·       Network Centralized Management
·       Synchronous Replication

StarWind will have a free webinar on this solution:
Tuesday, January 10, 2012 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM GMT ( 11:00 AM EST)

Register now to learn more!

Where: Hotel Vianen, Vianen the Netherlands

Time: 13.30 – 16.30

During this seminar Danny Daniels will explain all the ins and outs about DRAAS. A demonstration is part of this seminar. You can register via this link. More information here  www.vmug.nl.

Good reading which makes you understand the new features.

Download here.

Description:
In the release of VMware vSphere 5.0, VMware also released a new software storage appliance called the VMware vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA). VMware VSA provides an alternative shared storage solution to our Small to Medium Business (SMB) customers who might not be in a position to purchase a Storage Area Network (SAN) or Network-Attached Storage (NAS) array for their virtual infrastructure. Without shared storage configured in a vSphere environment, customers have not been able to exploit the unique features available in vSphere 5.0, such as vSphere High Availability (HA), vSphere, vMotion and vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). The VSA is designed to provide “Shared Storage for Everyone”.

Lots of organizations think the chance of a major disturbance is low. Still I hear a lot of stories about disasters or almost disasters. In most cases the cause of the disaster was not a natural one like fire, earthquake or flooding. Allmost all causes were related to human errors or software/hardware failures.

The image below is takes from an EMC survey on data losses http://netherlands.emc.com/about/news/press/2011/20111123-01.htm

To give an idea how easily a (near) disaster can hit your datacenter I collected some real stories about disasters.

1. Failure on Active Directory because of a NTP timeserver misconfiguration.
2. Complete shutdown of a datacenter because of power failure and failure of redundant systems.
3. Lost of hundreds of Active Directory accounts because of a failure in a script
4. Failure of a RAMsan because of a firmware fault and not up to date update process
5. Lost of tens of servers because an electrician put 380V on a 220V circuit
6. Almost lost of a storage array because someone put a plastic cover over the storage array to protect it against dust caused by some drilling in the serverroom.
7. Failure of  a SAN with a hugh impact on state of Virgina services.

Failure on Active Directory because of a NTP timeserver misconfiguration.
A company was using an external time server for the internal systems like Active Directory. All of a sudden the external timeserver (NTP) changed its time 1 year ahead. Nobody noticed the difference. When someone managing the external timeserver noticed the time difference, he or she adjusted the time and put it one year back. The customer using the external timeserver was using Active Directory and the time of the AD was synchronized with this time server. All of a sudden objects in AD had a timestamp one year ahead. It took Microsoft a lot of effort to fix this as backups were not correct.  A lot of production time was lost.

Complete shutdown of a datacenter because of power failure and failure of redundant systems.
A hospital had a power generator for it’s serverroom as well as a general power generator for the hospital. Both were dependant on a certain circuit. When the electricity went down , the primary power generator kick it, but failed. The power generator of the server room failed as well. The UPS in the serverroom has a capacity of 30 minutes. There was no shutdown script taking care of a clean shutdown of the servers.

Lost of hundreds of Active Directory accounts because of a failure in a script
A system administrator was doing some testing with a script. Instead of testing on a test OU, he did it on all OU. The script deleted hundreds of user accounts in Active Directory.

Failure of a RAMsan because of a firmware fault and not up to date update process
a RAMsan uses memory to store data. To deliver redundancy memory modules are in pairs like a RAID1 for harddisks. Data is written to two memory modules. If one module fails, the other takes over. But because of a firmware error, the failover did not happen. Result downtime of several hours of the storage to get this fixed.

Viginia fights computer failures
Apparently, one of their supposedly high-end enterprise class EMC Symmetrix DMX storage systems, supporting 26 different state agencies in Virginia, crashed on August 25th 2010 and more than a week later, many of those agencies were still down, including the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Department of Taxation and Revenue.
Read here and here about a major disaster happened at Virgina state