Virtual server technologies provide businesses and IT departments with the ability to do more with less, enabling the consolidation of data and applications onto a single server. As projects for server consolidation and server rationalisation are realised, the need to protect these virtualised systems is paramount as they are running multiple business-critical applications, requiring a higher level of protection. Double-Take now have a number of cost effective solutions for protecting virtual environments. The following guide may be helpful.

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Double-Take Availability Virtual Guest 5 Pack

This is a traditional replication edition. One of the key advantages here is that if you are replicating at the application level (not full server level) then you can failover AND failback between VMs with the Virtual Guest 5 Pack. Another key point is the Virtual Guest 5 Pack is not OS dependent so can support both Standard and Enterprise editions of Windows. The 5 Pack is a cost effective solution - it is worth noting that one licence of DT Availability Advanced Edition is the same cost as the Virtual Systems 5 licence pack.

DTAVAILVG5 Double-Take Availability Virtual Guest 5 Pack.

Double-Take Availability Virtual Host - Protecting vSphere

With Double-Take Availability Virtual Host you can recover your virtual machines, in their entirety, on another virtual server locally or at a disaster recovery site. Working at the ESX host level, it leverages VMware's snapshot capabilities to regularly replicate changes to protected VMs. In the event of an outage, the replicated virtual machine can be started on a second ESX server with the most recent data. Replicating VMs at the host level (entire VMs) on ESX, you can choose between Double-Take Availability Virtual Host –Standard, Advanced or Premium Edition.

DTAVAILVHSE Availability Virtual Host - Replication & Failover â€“ Standard Edition
5 ESX Protection Jobs (across any host)

DTAVAILVHAE Availability Virtual Host - Replication & Failover â€“ Advanced Edition
10 ESX Protection Jobs (across any host)

DTAVAILVHPE Availability Virtual Host - Replication & Failover â€“ Premium Edition
Unlimited ESX Protection Jobs (per host)

When licensing Double-Take Availability Virtual Host for ESX protection, only source virtual machines need to be counted towards the number of protection jobs.

Double-Take Availability - Protecting Hyper-V

With Double-Take you you can replicate and failover Hyper-V virtual machines in real-time over geographic distances without the expense and complexity of clustering and shared storage. Double-Take for Hyper-V installs on each production or recovery Hyper-V host in your environment. It replicates changes to a Hyper-V virtual machine's related files in real-time without the need to load agents into each guest operating system. This makes managing the protection process easier on IT administrators and allows organisations to protect any kind of OS, application and data running within a VM and easily recover it in the event of an outage

Availability Virtual Host - Unlimited Hyper-V Protection Jobs

When licensing Double-Take Availability for Hyper-V projects, both the source and target Hyper-V hosts must be licensed.

Move it or Lose it - Migration Made Easy

The last thing you want to do is spend your nights and weekends in the server room. That’s why Double-Take created Double-Take Move.

Double-Take Move lets you migrate from a physical server to virtual server or a virtual machine from one virtualisation platform to another. It automatically provisions new virtual machines for you – there's no manual configuration required. With Double-Take Move, you can migrate physical or virtual servers directly into VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V files, all in real-time.

• Migrate the entire system - from simple file servers to custom application servers and domain controllers.
• Operating systems, applications and data can be moved easily from one make, model and server configuration to another.
• Hardware independent; can also be used for migrating virtualized workloads back to physical servers.
• Migrate from a physical server to virtual server or a virtual machine from one virtualisation platform to another.
• Automatically provisions new virtual machines for you - there’s no manual configuration required.
• Migrate physical or virtual servers directly into VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V files, all in real-time.

So, if you need a migration solution but not the hassle and expense that usually comes with it then take a look at Double-Take Move: no complexity, no downtime and no platform or environment restrictions, even for X2X migrations.

Double-Take Virtual Systems Disaster Recovery Whitepaper

 

A brief white paper is available to download from here.

 

Health Check Service

 

The Double-Take health check service is available for inspecting installed Double-Take solutions to ensure systems remain in optimum operating condition, make best practice recommendations, and upgrade (if necessary) to keep your environment optimised.

 

DTAVAILINST  Q2 Special Double-Take Certified Engineer Per Day â‚¬ 750.00 ex VAT

(offer expires 30th June 2010)

 

Interested? Reply by email info@servaplex.com  to learn more.

 

Virtualisation and Disk Performance

 

Fragmentation exists at both the host and guest level – fragmentation on top of fragmentation. The result is rapidly increased "unnecessary" I/O traffic. Worse, virtual machines have limited knowledge of hardware resource usage and cannot effectively prioritise I/O. Defrag attempts will cut across production resources. Additionally, virtual disks that are set to dynamically grow don't shrink when users or applications remove data, bloating space and wasting what could be allocated to other virtual systems.

Diskeeper has created a vital component V-locity virtual platform disk optimiser on both the Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V OS that is running the virtual host and all Windows virtual machines (guests). Each component optimises its respective Windows OS and performs defragmentation of files and consolidation of free space. This minimises unnecessary I/O passed from the OS to the disk subsystem and aligns data on the drives for optimal access.

With the proprietary InvisiTasking, V-locity will automatically and invisibly defragment files and consolidate free space on every Windows system it is installed on, eliminating unnecessary and excess I/O to restore system performance and reliability for the entire platform. At the same time, V-locity provides a tool to analyse and compact wasted virtual disk space.

If you have any questions or require further information about any of the issues discussed then please feel free to give us a call on +353 (0)1 2304242 or email info@servaplex.com