Year: 2004

If any of the following sounds familiar, you need to come to this seminar:

– You?ve never had a disaster, you run on hope: you simply run backup processes every week and hope that you?d be able to recover systems if disaster struck
– You?ve never tested recovery due to hardware limitations: you would love to test your systems, but coming up with that many servers is impossible
– Testing your recovery plans is a painful, manual process: your backup software has great intelligence, but to utilize it you need to first spend hours installing the operating system and backup agents on the systems to be recovered
– Any hardware failure is synonymous with ?days of downtime?: ordering the replacement hardware and getting it shipped takes days, and there is still only limited assurance of a 100% successful recovery
– VMware and partners will draw examples from leading companies who have implemented virtual infrastructure in their Disaster Recovery & Backup environments.

We will show you how to:

– Make your existing backup and recovery strategy faster and more foolproof by using Virtual Machines
– Make your recovery process faster, more reliable and easier to test by using templates and other advanced features of virtualization

We will explain:

– How virtualization software integrates with market leading backup packages
– How the return on investment of your disaster recovery solution improves with the addition of virtual infrastructure

Virtual Server 2005 creates virtual machines on top of the Windows 2003 Server operating system, instead of at the hardware level like many of its competitors. Hardware-level virtualization ensures that the technology is compatible with nearly every operating system, but this approach often lacks seamless integration with host operating systems. Virtual Server 2005 leverages the management and performance tools included with Windows 2003 Server, making virtualization an almost transparent process.

CRN Test Center engineers installed Virtual Server 2005 on an HP TC100 server running Microsoft Small Business Server 2003. The server was equipped with a 2.66GHz Pentium 4 processor and 2 Gbytes of RAM, far exceeding the minimum requirements of a 550MHz Pentium III and 256 Mbytes of RAM.

Installation was straightforward and uncomplicated. Virtual Server 2005 requires that Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) be installed and active on the target server, since the product is managed through a Web site created under IIS. Once the management Web site is created, administrators can use Microsoft Internet Explorer to access and manage virtual machines. This management approach allows administrators to manage virtual machines from almost anywhere there is an IP connection to the server and Internet Explorer. The browser-based management console offers a clean interface that follows Microsoft’s standard conventions, making the product quite easy to master.

Virtual Server 2005 is simple to use, since most tasks are wizard-based. New virtual machines can be created in a matter of minutes with just a few mouse clicks. Administrators can connect remote drives to a Virtual Server management session, allowing the remote installation of new operating systems and applications.

Microsoft’s Virtual Server is an excellent tool for migrating legacy applications that run under previous versions of the Windows Server operating system. For example, an organization that deploys a Windows 2003 Server platform could use virtual machines to run legacy Windows NT 4.0 applications. Even legacy versions of other operating systems such as Novell’s NetWare or Unix variations will run under Virtual Server 2005, but Microsoft only offers support for its proprietary platforms.

Other notable features include the ability to create virtual networks and virtual disks, a must for software developers and deployment testers. Virtual networking allows for creation of a pseudo network that is isolated from the host machine’s primary network. Virtual disks allow on-demand disk resizing for virtual machine sessions. Administrators can also save an image of a virtual machine for backup or testing purposes or to move a virtual machine over to a new virtual server.

Please take a minute or two to complete this brief online VMware User Group interest survey:

http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB2KYJ4TYR6

Dunes S-Ops provides unified management and control of distributed heterogeneous virtual resources across the enterprise. Dunes S-Ops allows for aggregation of virtual resources, making them manageable as one single service, enabling multiple software, virtual and hardware resources to be managed as one pool of assets dedicated to a specific business activity.

Dunes Policy enables the definition, validation and implementation of custom scripted policies to automate service and operation level management. Dunes Policy provides the integrated development environment (IDE) and the tools to allow policies to be articulated, modeled, tested, implemented, evolved and re-used. Dunes Policy allows the policies to be implemented as wizards as well as traditional scripts.

“The combination of Dunes Policy with Dunes S-Ops for VMware Virtual Infrastructure allows us to capture those unique customer best practices to pro-actively orchestrate provisioning in a virtualized environment in real-time, based on their particular business needs” said Doug Weisberg president and CEO of Expert Server Group, a leading member of the VMware VAC program. ?We are pleased to provide a mean by which all VMware value added service providers can differentiate themselves? said Stephane Broquere, president and CEO of Dunes.

Key Features:

– Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for virtual machines automation.
– Integrated Java-script editor.
– Normalized scriptable objects throughout all virtual machines vendors.
– Actions templating for further usage in tasks (scheduled actions) and policies.
– Policy templating for virtual machines and infrastructure.
– Import/Export of actions and policies.

Benefits:

– Personalize and augment management system by creating custom actions.
– Apply policy and action templates using wizard.
– Enable virtual machine to be moved from one virtual machine host to another, even if the source host is unavailable (networked storage required).
– Virtual Machines fail-over with shared storage (NAS or SAN): automatically runs a clone of a virtual machine on another computer in case of virtual machine error detection. Both virtual machines share a single disk file.
– Virtual Machines fail-over without shared storage: automatically runs a copy of a virtual machine on another computer in case of virtual machine error detection. Each virtual machine runs from separate copies of a disk file.
– Backup automation: put virtual machines in such mode that it can be backuped (suspend or create redo log), creates a snapshot (if available) and drives the backup software at planned intervals.
– Workload management: automatically reallocates virtual machines on multiple servers according to workload.
– Alarm notification: Threshold values and e-mail/pager notifications can be set and users will be automatically notified.

Pricing and Availability

Dunes Policy is available today as an add-on to S-Ops 2.2. S-Ops 2.2 versions are available for both Windows and Linux host operating systems. Pricing for Dunes Policy is based on a per virtual machine basis. License prices are (in Swiss Francs):

– 149 Swiss Francs per VMware GSX Server virtual machine
– 299 Swiss Francs per VMware ESX Server virtual machine.

VAC Partners are required to train and certify their consultants to ensure the highest levels of services and customer satisfaction. As part of the VAC Partnership, MSI consultants can provide the following benefits to clients:

– The ability to deliver pre-packaged consulting engagements, such as VMware Virtual Center Jumpstart, VMware ESX Server JumpStart, VMware Physical to Virtual (P2V) Migrations
– Access to online educational and technical resources and forums at VMware Channel Connect
– Exposure and credibility as a recommended service provider

MSI’s systems engineering staff completed the rigorous training required for Authorized Consulting Partner certification. MSI’s certified consultants will assist in providing the necessary resources to help customers build and maintain a virtual infrastructure that maximizes efficiency. For its customers, MSI works to achieve total solutions from a single source in an on demand environment.