At the beginning of the week, the Quest subsidiary Vizioncore released a major update for its vReplicator (formerly esxReplicator).
Version 3.0 introduces the following new features:
- Active Block Mapping (ABM) technology
ABM filters deleted data blocks so that only active blocks are
scanned and streamed to the target. White space detection eliminates the need to
compress, stream, and write zero blocks during the replication process. - Support for VMware vSphere 4.0 Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technology
CBT tracks the disk block changes made by the source VM. vReplicator 3.0 can take advantage of CBT, once enabled on the source host, to record the blocks that have changed since the last
replication pass and transfer them to the target host without scanning the VMDK. - Support for VMware vSphere 4.0 virtual machines with thin disks
When replicating a VM containing thin discs from an ESX 4 host to an ESX 4 host,
vReplicator 3.0 will create a replica VM with thin discs. In addition, when configuring
jobs for VMs with thin disks, vReplicator will only show targets that support thin disks. - Support for VMware vSphere 4.0 Storage vMotion
It ensures that previously scheduled replication jobs continue to run successfully after one or more of the source disks are SVMotioned.
In addition, the disks on the SVMotion target datastores are replicated instead of the ones originally configured in the replication jobs.
Vizioncore also changed its licensing model, moving from a per-VM model to a per-CPU one. Now each physical CPU socket on an ESX Server host requires one CPU license.