Technical Community - Background Reading

http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/Double+Take+Availability+with+VMware+%26+MD3200i

Chat Transcript

Dell-ScottH Welcome everyone to this week's Tech Tuesday chat!
Dell-ScottH Today's Topic is Double-Take Availability on Dell PowerVault MD3200i with VMware ESX
Dell-ScottH So I'd like to welcome several members from the Double-Take team that are joining us today
Dell-ScottH We've got the Mike's :-)
Dell-ScottH And Derek (dacheek) and Matt Long (incognito)
Dell-ScottH We also have some experts on the Dell PowerVault 3200i joining – Randy and jwisnes.
Dell-ScottH Derek and Randy came to the lab a couple of weeks ago.
Dell-ScottH And we hammered out a demo with Double-Take Availability.
Dell-ScottH The demo and lab setup can be found here ...
Dell-ScottH http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/double+take+availability+with+vmware+%26+md3200i
Dell-ScottH I'll let the Double-Take team jump in and describe the Availability product – Mike D can you jump in here?
Mike_D_Double-Take Sure, I can do that.
Mike_D_Double-Take Double-Take Availability is a single solution to replicate anything on a Windows or RedHat/SUSE Linux platform and then provide multiple options for rapid failover.
Dell-ScottH Link to product details - http://www.doubletake.com/english/products/double-take-availability/pages/default.aspx
Mike_D_Double-Take So we can do data-only protection where we re-direct users to a new server or Full Server Failover where we convert different hardware into the original machine (Windows Only).
Dell-ScottH What are some of the advantages compared to the competition? Or is there no competition? :-)
Mike_D_Double-Take There are probably about 50 typos in that please ignore them.
Mike_D_Double-Take Nope, we have competition. However, we're usually out in front of them in a few ways:
Mike_D_Double-Take First, we're hardware agnostic, so you can combine multiple hardware platforms.
Mike_D_Double-Take Which makes things a lot easier if you happen to already have the production systems set up?
Mike_D_Double-Take Secondly, we're application agnostic as well, which means that we'll protect whatever systems you need to provide failover for, without you needing to purchase add-ons for specific applications.
Dell-ScottH So I could easily move … say ... HP and IBM servers to a Dell PowerEdge R910 with VMware ESX ?
Mike_D_Double-Take Right.
dacheek And part of what the demo shows is how the workflow is the same for Physical and Virtual environments, so we work the same in both, and can move Workloads between Physical and Virtual.
Mike_D_Double-Take Both for migration (Double-Take Move) and for ongoing protection (Double-Take Availability).
Dell-ScottH So handles Microsoft Exchange, Oracle, SQL Server no problem? No extra agents needed?
Mike_D_Double-Take Exactly, the Move and Availability platforms are not application specific.
Mike_D_Double-Take So you can use the same software to move or protect Microsoft Exchange, SQL, Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft SharePoint, custom applications, 3rd-party apps.
Mike_D_Double-Take We've even done more complex applications like CRM systems that span multiple data-farms.
Dell-ScottH Yes, @dacheek, that was one of the really nice things I liked when playing with it in the lab – the P2v (Physical to Virtual) and V2v (Virtual to Virtual) worked exactly the same – I was pretty surprised at how easy it was to use and how quick it was.
Mike_D_Double-Take We do have a few Virtual-specific tools, but for the most part you can freely use the same tools you do for P2p.
Dell-ScottH Still kicking myself for not trying it out sooner when we moved our lab servers from physical to VMs (Virtual Machines) a few months back, really could have saved myself a ton of time.
Mike_D_Double-Take The interesting thing is that we can also move from, say, Hyper-V to VMware.
Dell-ScottH So what are some of the virtual-specific tools you're referring to?
Mike_D_Double-Take Truly universal migration and protection.
Dell-ScottH Ahhhh – so I can use either or Hyper-V/VMware to protect the other?
Mike_D_Double-Take The Virtual Recovery Assistant tool-set that comes with Move and Availability allows you to pre-configure a sub-set of VMs (we call them helpers) on a VMware ESX/vSphere Host.
Mike_D_Double-Take And then use those VMs to auto-provision the failover devices.
Mike_D_Double-Take Given the appropriate info (CPU's, RAM, disk space, etc.) we will spin up the VMs and get everything into them.
Mike_D_Double-Take And yes, you can go from one VM platform to another, but sometimes that requires treating pre-configured VMs like physical servers.
Mike_D_Double-Take VRA (Virtual Recovery Assistant) is specific to VMware ESX Enterprise and up, or Hyper-V– anything else, just create the VMs ahead of time.
Dell-RandyB One of the other things that are interesting especially at the DR (Disaster Recovery) site is the backup product from Double-Take.
Mike_D_Double-Take Double-Take Backup? Yup, we use that to provide many-to-one protection with the idea of recovery instead of failover.
Emptyone How about replication/backup to a different site? How's bandwidth usage?
Mike_D_Double-Take Multiple servers replicate data and system-state information to a Repository (a Windows or Linux file server) which then can restore that information back to the same or different hardware.
Mike_D_Double-Take We're quite bandwidth-efficient.
Dell-ScottH Yes, can you take a little about the bandwidth throttling? I showed some in the demo, but what are the differences in the settings for WANs?
Mike_D_Double-Take We send only the byte-level changes written to disk.
Mike_D_Double-Take And we can throttle a schedule.
dacheek The real nice part of VRA is that its part of Double-Take Availability... so you can use the tool to P>v, V>v, or even V>p your workload, then just chose another part of the workflow to then enable DR protection of the server.
Mike_D_Double-Take Either at a fixed rate, or via time/date constraints.
Mike_D_Double-Take Keep in mind that there are 3 levels of compression available.
Mike_D_Double-Take And finally, if you use a 3rd-party bandwidth optimizer (which Dell has a few partners for) then we play nicely with those as well.
Emptyone The topic was for WMware, but going to ask a Hyper-V question. Do you protect at the host or guest level?
Mike_D_Double-Take As with all of our solutions, VRA is application agnostic, so as long as it can run in a VM, we're good to go.
Mike_D_Double-Take For VMware, we typically protect at the guest level.
Mike_D_Double-Take For Hyper-V, we can do both, but for transactional applications, guest level is preferred.
Dell-ScottH Is there a paper on sizing? Say I just want to create a server that will host my replicas and run just a few in case of a failure – any good recommendations or tools to help size how beefy that system should be and how much storage? Of course using Dell PowerVault MD3200i. :-)
Mike_D_Double-Take Well, that's a rough question, but one we get all the time.
Dell-ScottH I know "it depends."
Mike_D_Double-Take We'd have to talk with you about what kind of servers you're running, and of course we'd want to talk with VMware.
Dell-ScottH So maybe the question really is … are there service engagements that can help me, or pre-sales assistance?
Mike_D_Double-Take In general, you don't want to overload the target device with too many VMs, so while some performances hit in a failover scenario is probably acceptable, you want to size the target to run just as you would if it were a production system.
Mike_D_Double-Take Tons!
Mike_D_Double-Take There are Double-Take reps throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia who are happy to discuss specifics.
Emptyone Does the software use de-duplication for backup?
Mike_D_Double-Take Plus, since we have partnerships with both Dell and VMware (Microsoft too) we can bring in whoever we need.
Dell-ScottH I know on twitter it's easy enough to reach out to @doubletake ... what about other methods to contact ya’ll?
Mike_D_Double-Take @emptyone. Yes, we do Single Instance Storage de-duplication on the Backup Repository.
Mike_D_Double-Take Visit http://www.doubletake.com and you can link into a live chat with one of our reps.
Mike_D_Double-Take Or just call the 800 number there, and we'll route you to the right folks.
Mike_D_Double-Take E-mail works too, info@doubletake.com.
Mike_D_Double-Take Don't forget, you can also call your Dell rep and ask, they can grab our guys and bring them into conference calls and meetings.
Emptyone What price ranges are we talking about for your software?
Mike_D_Double-Take That's definitely a question that your Dell rep would be able to answer. Since they resell the software, they're going to be your best resource for pricing info.
Emptyone Ok.
Emptyone What load does the backup put on the server it is backing up?
Dell-ScottH Good question, I should have measured that during the test.
Mike_D_Double-Take Not that much at all. The Agent for Double-Take Backup tends to run about 3-5% of the CPU (depending on compression options, etc.) and uses a user-defined amount of RAM and disk-space.
Mike_D_Double-Take Ball-park on those is about 256-1gb of RAM (you set the level) and about 10% of the protected used space for disk-queuing.
Mike_D_Double-Take So for 100gb of protected data, we'd recommend about 10GB of space, somewhere on the server (different disk is ok.)
Mike_D_Double-Take Those are not hard numbers, BTW, so you may need much less of both RAM and Disk.
Mike_D_Double-Take So, let's hear about what you're trying to accomplish.
Mike_D_Double-Take Are you looking for failover, backup/restore, something else?
Emptyone We are running Hyper-V clusters on three main sites, with Dell EqualLogic storage. So looking for a good solution for backup/replication.
Mike_D_Double-Take How quickly do you need to get back up and running if you lose one of the clusters?
Mike_D_Double-Take Ball-park numbers are fine here.
Emptyone For the most important servers I would say 4-8 hours would be acceptable.
Emptyone But pricing is an issue, so if things can get up faster for not to high of a cost, that is interesting as well.
Mike_D_Double-Take Great, that puts you on the edge between Availability (less than 4 hours) and Backup (more than 4 hours), so my next question would be to ask if there are some applications that need to survive a site outage with 4 hours or less of downtime.
Emptyone We are running AX (Axapta) as ERP, and that is important to have up and running as close to 24/7 as possible, and Microsoft Exchange is also important.
Mike_D_Double-Take For Backup, you'd just need a set of repositories (we'd have to dive a bit deeper to tell you how many – but think about 1 per 10 VMs in production or so) and a set of Dell PowerVault 3200i disk to hold the information.
Mike_D_Double-Take For Availability, you'd need to set up some VMs that are always running at the DR site, but we can then offer failover in as little as about 15-30 minutes.
Mike_D_Double-Take How much space backup needs depends on two factors, the amount of data in production and the length of time you want to have "any-point-in-time" recovery. We can do that for up to 31 days, and then we switch to VSS Snapshot point-in-time recovery.
Mike_D_Double-Take So, if you need less "any-point" recovery, you need less disk space.
Emptyone Does your software then sort out IP changes automatically since the server might be started in a different site, or is that a manual job?
Mike_D_Double-Take BTW, that recovery can be file or directory level as well, so if you don't lose the whole server, you can still recover just certain data components.
Mike_D_Double-Take Availability can update DNS (AD natively) and get users connected to a different IP.
Emptyone We got about 4-8 Tb of VMs per site today.
Mike_D_Double-Take Backup (because it's designed to have a much longer Recovery Time Objective or RPO) can bring up the server on a new IP, but doesn't handle DNS updates.
Mike_D_Double-Take We can also do them via Microsoft Office Live Meeting, so no worries.
Emptyone You can look over our EQ setup at the same time then. :)
Emptyone When doing a restore from backup, is all done through GUI and you just choose which cluster we want it back on?
Mike_D_Double-Take Yes, it's all done through a GUI, and on Hyper-V you tell us what host to go to, or which pre-created VM to go to if you're not using the VRA system.
Mike_D_Double-Take VRA is included, so most folks use that.
Mike_D_Double-Take We'll ask you for information like account info for access, how many CPU's, how much RAM, where to create the volumes, etc.
Mike_D_Double-Take The rest is automated.
Emptyone Sounds really good.
Mike_D_Double-Take Plus, if you just need to get data back, say Microsoft Exchange E-mail or public folder items, then you don't need to restore the whole server.
Mike_D_Double-Take We can restore individual files, groups of files or directories to the original server/mailbox, a new server/mailbox or a PST (for Exchange only of course).
Emptyone Do you support item level backup/restore on Exchange?
Mike_D_Double-Take Yes, Mailbox, Mail Item, Public Folder, PF Item.
Mike_D_Double-Take And we do indeed continue to support Public Folders *and* Pst's =)
Emptyone How about Microsoft SharePoint/SQL?
dacheek Yes. So a couple points on how the products are different... DT Availability is a real-time replication and failover solution that encompasses application protection, full server failover, multi-site MS clustering, VRA and virtual host protection. DT Backup is just that, a many: 1 backup solution that provides a single point of backup and our CDP option of the data being protected. With DT Backup it not only protects the data, but also allows a recovery function to a physical or virtual environment.
Mike_D_Double-Take We can do database level for that, but not Object Level for Microsoft SharePoint just yet.
Emptyone Your software uses agents installed on the guests?
Mike_D_Double-Take For backup, Yes. For Availability, guest or host.
Emptyone And how about reboots? Do your agents need that when installed or updated?
Mike_D_Double-Take On Windows 2003 SP2 or higher – as long as .NET 3.5.1 is already installed, no reboot
Dell-ScottH We are coming up on the end of the hour – feel free to stay as long as necessary – but those that need to drop – feel free as well... there will be a transcript of this entire chat posted on the same link that got you here tomorrow – so send anyone that is interested to read it.
Mike_D_Double-Take I think it might be a good idea to hook an Emptyone up with his local Dell reps, they can get him tons of information on both the Double-Take software and the storage to hold it.
Dell-ScottH Mike, what's your twitter ID for everyone.
Mike_D_Double-Take Mine is @talonnyc and Double-Take Software has a couple: @doubletake and @doubletake_dell spring to mind. As well as @doubletakeemea for Emptyone.
Mike_D_Double-Take Our Social Media team also keeps an eye on the Twitter timeline for those accounts, so you can @reply with questions.
Dell-ScottH Thanks again to everyone for joining – be sure to view the demo – http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/double+take+availability+with+vmware+%26+md3200i And ask any questions directly on the page.