Big investment required on DR? Running out of budget to host the DR solution? Capex cuts due to economy crisis and impacted the IT project implementation and operational?
For any reason you may currently experience multiple type of challenges as part of the leadership of your company, Project Manager, Solution Architect, as well as System engineer. Before the born of the Hypervisor, most of the cases, you may require building or implementing the same amount of servers and storages to ensure synchronization from production to DR sites.
It had been 180 degrees turned around today, as you may go actually look for hypervisor VMware ESX as the best solution in the market to really fully virtualize the DR solution for your environment. Trust me or not, I had already done it for every system which requires to be in DR such as ERP, SAP, Web servers, E-commerce and etc. In the yearly DR test, we had not experience any issues which are due to servers unstable, out of synchronization and etc. No matter what, virtualization had become realistic since couple of years back, and basically myself had taken the opportunity to virtualize the DR and prove it as a strong justification to build and gain the respect and confident from all customers worldwide. Some of you guys may had business concerns over the Virtualization technology performance metrics. Virtualization on DR does help on this case to impress the customers as well as the IT support team.
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VCB is Cool? But it may not Cool for me.
Since the day VMware had launched the VCB to the public which promising to deliver the real solution for backup related. I am really followed up the news since the day they declare the roadmap until it get down to the market of the release.
I should say I am disappointed with the VCB abilities today as I do believe to get VCB work, there had been too much extra cost had needed to be incurred to our investment. As you may aware, I believe the most popular backup software now days which fully integrated well with VCB in the market, which had been demo LIVE during the VMworld year 2007 is only Symantec Netbackup. To setup the POC and test is not too tough in this case, but I started realize as it didn’t really justify the amount of money I should put in to my backup environment.
As for most of the VMs in production today which had been considered critical and important, but it still not as important as the physical DB or ERP servers which run in production. To have VCB in place, the TCO is higher than using the standard Netbackup we currently.
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Using VMware Update Manager is pretty easy for VMware patch update but I would like to share about how to update VMware ESX patch using command line interface here as an alternative way.
First download VMware patch from VMware download web site said for an example:
VMware ESX 3.5 Update 2
Latest Version: 3.5 Update 2 | 8/13/2008 | Build: 110268
Login with your username & password and click YES for agree with VMware Inc. term and condition.
Option 1:
Once completed the VMware patch download, you can either copy the patch source file to Apache or IIS web server and unzip it said http://webserver.malaysiavm.com/esxupdate/
Before continue with VMware ESX host patch, you can vmotion all VMware guest from ESX host 1 to VMware ESX host 2. Connect to VMware ESX host 1 box using SSH,
Enter server maintenance mode:
Tips: How can I check whether ESX host is in maintenance mode.
Turn Off Firewall:
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Time synchronize always important in every solution or platform. As ESX claim and advice the users to sync all the VM in ESX with the ESX host, I am here to explain why we shouldn’t do this.
- Recent major bugs from VMware had encountered exprie issue which disallow VM to be power on or Vmotion. What I had done personally is ” stop the NTP synchronization from esx host, and change the date back to 5 days back before the VM expire”. This easily solve my issue and allow me to Vmotion all the VM machine to another destination host without any interruption. Can you imagine if you sync all the VM with ESX host, you will lose this flexibility and in the big pain to figure out, how would you able to simplify the patch process to fix the bugs even VMware had released the bug fix
- I still do not see any potential issues with the current configuration that we sync all the VM and physical servers to multiple NTP servers we do have in our environment. Standardization always important as if we can minimize the different method of support and maintenance, it will help to reduce complexity. Read more »
Here is some explanation from VMware regarding the different module been offered on the ESX 3i from VMware.
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