Forget the feature matrix with all the check marks. Forget the price comparison and the price per virtual machine or cost per application. For the sake of consideration, assume an “apples to apples” scenario and focus on VMware and Microsoft virtualization solutions, vSphere Enterprise (or Plus) and Server 2008 R2 with the Hyper-V, as production implementation projects. Put yourself in the shoes of someone responsible for implementing both virtual infrastructures and following best practices. Forget bias. Forget allegiance. Build the best virtual infrastructure design based on the prerequisites and requirements of each solution. Build it with the best interest of the company who will administer and support it going forward.

There is a lot to consider in the first paragraph, and as any consultant would say, the final decision depends on what other objectives the solution will need to satisfy besides just serving as server infrastructure. Again, for the sake of consideration, I’m going to zoom in on the server infrastructure and leave the “other” out of the implementation.

Again, for the sake of consideration, can the difference between choosing to implement production virtual infrastructure with VMware or Microsoft be simplified to a aligning with either companies strategic vision? I’ll attempt to make that case in this post.

For the sake of being open and honest before I continue, I’ll state up front that I personally have yet to implement a production Hyper-V environment, but as a consulting engineer working for a large Microsoft partner, I’ve sat in certification training, experimented a little in the home lab, and have been looking very closely at the implementation services needed to deploy Hyper-V for customers recently.

This post holds my thoughts on some major implementation differences as I understand them today. Please point out where I have missed the mark or help me consider other factors that I may have missed.

Microsoft virtualization is a part of Windows

Implementing Hyper-V Makes the most sense after you already have Active Directory (AD) with System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) already in place. Sure, Hyper-V Server 2008 can be installed bare metal as a stand alone hypervisor or it’s possible to build VI with Server 2008 core before AD, but are those scenarios really feasible for production?

Hyper-V with HA (Quick Migration), Live Migration, and all of the other advanced features essentially depends on Fail Over Clustering. Fail Over Clustering depends on Active Directory. Therefore, it makes the most sense to establish physical AD infrastructure and join Hyper-V hosts to the Forest or Domain. Sure, most companies will already have a healthy AD already in place.

Should System Center Operations Manager and Virtual Machine Manager be physical as well? They don’t have to, but that decision, in my opinion, ultimately comes down to a comfort level about running the monitoring and management servers inside the environment they are monitoring and managing. Logistically speaking, the SCOM pieces may be the first VMs created on the first several Hyper-V hosts, however. Since the added value of  SCOM is administration of physical hosts as well, does it make more sense to keep SCOM physical too?

Think about my scenario as a consultant. Given a week or so to perform the implementation and server consolidation as a turn key project, I can build stand alone Hyper-V servers and manage them with the Hyper-V Manager easily enough, but I will quickly need Fail Over Clustering. SCVMM is arguably needed shortly after.

These are some implementation reasons that align with the idea that Microsoft has built Hyper-V as an extension of a Windows infrastructure that already exists. Hyper-V seems to favor scenarios where parts of the environment will be consolidated. If you really think about it, of course Microsoft would do it this way.

VMware wants to virtualize 100% of your data center

Active Directory makes life easier in VMware vSphere environments too, but implementing most of the desirable vSphere features is not dependent on it. DNS is needed, but not necessarily Microsoft DNS.

An ESX Cluster is not a traditional, quorum based application cluster but instead a pool of hardware resources joined together by the vCenter Management Server and it’s agents deployed on each ESX host. Microsoft Clustering is not needed and it’s dependencies can be avoided.

Most of the VMware implementations I have been involved with over the last 4 years could have been viewed as complete data center migrations. I’ve suggested that migrating to VMware VI should be treated by the IT Team the same as a physical data center move based on that fact. Therefore, customers usually P2V the Microsoft AD infrastructure entirely to the VI. More times than not there is a tough decision about whether to leave at least one physical DC in the environment.

Final Thoughts / Questions

To summarize the last 2 sections I pose some implementation centered thoughts / questions to VMETC.com readers:

• Is it an important point to understand that a VMware vSphere environment can completely host Windows AD infrastructure as guests eliminating the need for any physical servers other than the vSphere infrastructure?
• Does it matter that Microsoft Hyper-V environments need an established Windows environment? Remember I am talking about production implementation using best practices for your company / my customers. I know Hyper-V can be configured in a workgroup without a DC, but is that really an production implementation option considering feature needs like Live Migration and HA?
• Do you view a layer of separation between Active Directory and the hypervisor as an added benefit? What happens if you corrupt the AD database in VMware versus Hyper-V environments?

Let me know your thoughts!

The GestaltIT Tech Field Day (TFD) is the gift that keeps on giving! From now until the end of the year (2009), VM /ETC readers can use the promotional code BRAMBLEY when buying a Drobo from Data Robotics and receive a discount.

For those that don’t already know about Drobo storage and the BeyondRaid technology, I posted about the Data Robotics TFD presentation a few weeks ago.

When you are ready to purchase just go to the Data Robotics store. The VM /ETC reader code is good until the end of the year (2009) and offers the following discounts:

Drobo $50 off <> Drobo S $75 off <> DroboPro $150 off <> DroboElite $350 off

Just enter BRAMBLEY in the Promotional Code field when placing your order.

For the record, I have not received any compensation for this post nor will I receive compensation from the use of this code. Enjoy and Happy Holidays!

Shortly after VMworld  I posted about my experience using vCloud Express. One of the things that I expected to see but found missing from the solution was the ability to perform virtual machine (VM) uploads and downloads between my own vSphere infrastructure and the hosted VMware environment. To be able to move my workloads (running on VMware VMs) from my private data center to the cloud or visa versa was an expectation I had based on the federated and private cloud discussions I’ve listened to over the past year. I expected to be able to at least manually export or import an OVF, but unfortunately did not find that capability while testing.

Before continuing allow me the liberty to reference a common expression - Can’t see the forest for the trees:

“An expression used of someone who is too involved in the details of a problem to look at the situation as a whole”

VMware has created the opposite scenario described in this expression with their concept of the Cloud. That is, VMware has allowed us to visualize what the forest will be before we have the trees. Of course, they had to. Was anyone besides Amazon talking Cloud before that, and if they were, was anyone even considering allowing companies to create their own internal clouds? I’d have to say VMware put the concept in my head. All I can say for sure is that I know I wasn’t listening to Cloud discussions before VMworld 2008.

Getting back to my vCloud Express testing and expectations, I was finally looking at the trees instead of the forest. I have since found some interesting information about how these trees are growing (if you will). To complete my reference, some of the details about VM transfer between private and public clouds are revealed by a VMware project has been privately referred to as Project Redwood.

First of all, I recently discovered the SearchCloudComputing.com post by Alex Barrett titled  VMware to tout ‘Redwood’ cloud computing project. This post was actually published before VMworld 2009 and featured a session about “… specific technologies behind the cloud, and what customers should expect for their datacenters and from cloud provider environments”. Barrett provides a little background on Redwood:

“The Redwood code-name surfaced in June when VMware released the schedule builder for the VMworld 2009 show in San Francisco next month. The agenda listed session TA4102 “Introduction to Redwood” with VMware director of cloud computing and virtual appliances William Shelton … ”

[omitted]

“VMware has since renamed the session “Unveiling New Cloud Technologies,” but the session description is the same.”

Barrett’s link to TA4102 is actually to a VMworld 2009 preview post from virtualfuture.info since the VMworld 2009 session had not happened yet. You can now get the TA4102 Unveiling New Cloud Technologies .PDF or listen to the session from VMworld.com. The session (which I did not attend) contained content specifically about transferring VMs as vApps and OVFs. The following 2 slides were taken from the downloadable .PDF.

I find it exciting now that the “trees” of the vSphere Cloud are beginning to come into clearer focus. We’ve heard about vApps and OVFs in the context of their specific functions and value to virtual infrastructure before, but now we are beginning to see them as the pieces (trees) to total VMware Private Cloud solution. When combined with the common architecture of the vSphere plug-in and the vSphere Client, it almost seems to simplify the technology needed to transfer VMs back and forth.

Going back to Barrett’s post again, another example of how more already familiar vSphere “trees” seem to suddenly reveal themselves:

“In particular, Redwood uses Lab Manager’s network fencing technology to quarantine virtual environments “so there’s no bleed-through,” the source said, and VMware Orchestrator for automating the configuring and provisioning of a VMware cloud workload.”

vCenter Client Shortcuts by Bouke Groenescheij is post worth book marking by VMware admins who want to speed up their administration and management of vSphere. Check out the entire post for many, many more shortcuts than those listed here, but I am high-lighting some of the key navigational shortcuts for my own reference later (and making sure I have a backup link to Groenescheij’s post!).

The following screen shots show the Ctrl+Shift keystroke combinations to move between the most common VI Client management views:

Other Ctrl+Shift Navigational shortcuts

Surely you’ve heard about Drobo by now? As the presenter in the last slot of the GetsaltIT Tech Field Day (TFD) schedule a few weeks ago,  Data Robotics was probably the most anticipated session by my fellow Delegates. I’ll admit, I had heard enough about the technology during the 2 day event that I was looking forward to the presentation as well. Data Robotics did not disappoint. Evidence can be seen in the enthusiasm expressed in the various posts and videos published since that session.

As always, I’ll leave the deep technical details of Drobo’s unique and patented Drobo BeyondRaid technology to my fellow storage bloggers and stay focused on how Data Robotics fits in virtual infrastructure. In this post I expand a little on why the Drobo storage device is a VMware HCL certified, simple to implement and expand iSCSI SAN targeted for SMB customers that is an exciting alternative. Finally I offer opinions based primarily on my virtualization server administrator perspective.


Data Robotics and Drobo Product Overview
The company started with the basic Drobo product: a 4 SATA drive bay desktop storage device that’s primary use case is marketed as ideal for large photo collections or archiving and protecting other similar data. Home users or small business users can easily insert the drives and attached a Drobo to a Mac or Windows PC via USB or Firewire. Within minutes a redundant storage repository can be configured by a 12 year old boy (for example) without any technical expertise. Drobo then introduced the DroboPro, an 8 disk bay device targeted for SMBs. Designed as a single host storage solution, DroboPro added a single ethernet port and iSCSI capability to it’s connection options. Cali Lewis even featured the DroboPro in episode #593 of her popular GeekBrief.TV video podcasts.

Data Robotics told us during their TFD presentation that to date they had about 80,000 customers. I mention the BeyondRaid technology later in this post, but I’m sure a lot of these customers were intrigued by the cost of the device and not just the technology. As mentioned on a previous Infosmack podcast hosted by Greg Knieriemen, a DroboPro with 16 TB of usable disk storage can be purchased for roughly $4000! That cost and capacity is based on the current cost of 2 TB SATA drives – the largest capacity available today. Check out the Infosmack TFD wrap up episode as well for more comments from attendees on Drobo.

It should be mentioned that Data Robotics was surprised that a healthy percentage of those customers began using Drobo for ESX storage before Data Robotics knew about it. That discovery lead them to get the VMware HCL certification.

DroboElite released
On 11/23 Data Robotics introduced 2 new products, the DroboElite and DroboS. DroboElite is aimed squarely for the SMB datacenter and improves the DroboPro’s prevision data center shortcomings. With dual ethernet ports and official support for up to 16 ESX hosts in a cluster, the DroboElite is obviously engineered to maximize it’s role as a ISCSI SAN option for ESX Clusters.

TFD organizer and Microsoft Storage MVP Stephen Foskett states it best in one of his posts:

“… DroboElite delivers nearly everything a small business could want from a computer closet storage device. It is a real honest-to-goodness iSCSI SAN array, supporting multiple servers and sporting dual gigabit Ethernet ports and dual-drive data protection.”

The press release linked above also provides the following virtualization related info:

“Tested VMware-ready Features – With dual iSCSI ports and the ability to create up to 255 Smart Volumes, DroboElite can support growing VMware environments and advanced VMware functionality including VMotion, Storage VMotion, snapshots, and high availability.”

BeyondRaid Overview
Data Robotic’s BeyondRaid eliminates provisioning arrays and fully utilizes total disk capacity even when used with a different size disks in the bays. For example, a Drobo storage device can have 2TB, 1TB, 500GB, 300GB, and 250GB SATA drives (or any combination of sizes for up to 8 SATA drives simultaneously) without limiting the data distribution to the smallest drive size. Furthermore, the drives can be any commodity SATA drives (buy them from where ever you want!) and can be added and removed while Drobo is powered on (up to 2 drives at a time with DroboElite). Best of all, you can remove the smallest drive and replace it with a larger one and increase the total disk capacity – all while the Drobo is serving live data! This means as SATA disk capacity and performance increases in the future, the total capacity and performance of a Drobo will do the same. Simply remove the old disks and replace with new disks on your own schedule.

At Tech Field Day we witnessed first hand the ease of creating Drobo storage volumes in the hands on labs. We were freely able to remove and insert SATA drives. Simplicity is an understatement in this process. Any non-technical employee could monitor and easily handle administration of the Drobo products.  Watch the various videos linked in this post to see what I mean.

My Virtualization Admin Opinions
Data Robotics’ BeyondRaid is an exciting technology. it seems to be the perfect mix of ease to administer, redundancy, self healing, and self optimization. The announcement of the DroboElite product and the VMware HCL status legitimizes Data Robotics’ devices as a VMware storage option at an incredible price.

VMware customers with 16 or less ESX hosts probably can’t find as much storage for so little cost. I’m not usually focused on price so leave me comments for other options in the >10 TB usable disk for less than $5k category. I definitely want to know about those!

When considering alternatives to Drobo based on price, can you even buy a feature comparable server that could be used as an iSCSI target? Even if you can you will have to install an OS. There are cheap and free operating systems to serve iSCSI storage, but what about administering the hardware, drivers, firmware, etc when buying a server. Drobo still seems to be the best option to minimize the total cost of storage implementation and ownership.

Unfortunately there is only one power supply on all models of the Drobo. Hopefully this is on the short term roadmap. I do not recall being told as much, but I don’t recall anyone asking either. One power supply makes sense for the Drobo on the desktop, but in a rack in the data center redundant power is a must have for production deployments.

Today DroboElite seems to be a perfect fit for Dev/Test Labs. Perhaps even remote branch office scenario where a field engineer is not normally present.

It will be interesting to see if Drobo evolves their product line for enterprise customers or if an enterprise storage vendor acquires Data Robotics for integrating the BeyondRaid technology in their product lines.

If your curious about performance, fellow GestaltIT author and co Delegate at Tech Field Day, Devang Panchigar posted some basic testing results.

updated 12.06.09 – Chris Evans, another TFD delegate, posted about his experience implementing the DroboPro. Chris expresses the same concern about a single power supply as well as some other interesting quirks when deploying as an iSCSI SAN. Note that Evans’ post is not about the new, DroboElite, however. Check out the comments for a lengthy reply from Brad Meyer, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Data Robotics, Inc.

Disclosure: I received a vest/jacket and a certificate to purchase products at a discount from Data Robotics while at Tech Field Day. I have not purchased a Drobo as of this writing.

On the TechRepublic Servers and Storage Blog, Scott Lowe (not this Scott Lowe) posted his objective feature comparison table of VMware vSphere and Hyper-V on Server 2008 R2. Two things from Lowe’s Microsoft’s Hyper-V R2 vs. VMware’s vSphere: A feature comparison caught my eye and made it worth pointing out to VM /ETC readers:

1. Lowe currently runs ESX but, in his words: ” As Microsoft continues to improve Hyper-V R2, we will monitor its progress to determine if and when it might be able to replace VMware.”
2. Lowe actually compares the latest editions of both vSphere and Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V

Read the entire post for Lowe’s explanation of each feature row, but I am posting a screen shot of his table here.

TechRepublic vSphere and Hyper-V R2 Feature Comparison By Scott Lowe

I feel the table is important because it does a good job of displaying commonly examined hypervisor maximums, capabilities and short comings of the various editions, and a comparison of some of the popular host features. This is a good “from the trenches” administrator view, and not the typical marketing comparison.

I also feel this table (and any other hypervisor table comparison) lacks because the matrix can only be a small representation of the total implementation value / consideration / cost. Storage, networking, infrastructure requirements, complexity, third party support (back up and management products), and vendor support / community are all real world factors that make a difference in the total decision – in my opinion.

In the last row it appears Lowe is comparing just the cost of the hypervisors, and it should be argued that the cost of vCenter needs to be included based on the feature requirements (and the title row’s inclusion) of VMware’s management server. I guess this supports a comment about “VMware’s total cost becoming more of an issue” Lowe makes at the end of his post. Although VMware argues that price per application or VM density is the best way to evaluate the two solutions, this justification continues to fall short of many small to medium business’ only real measuring stick – the total price of the purchase order.

Unfortunately, Lowe’s end of  post comments hint that the “just good enough” hypervisor theory has some merit and is gaining some momentum in organizations like his own.

It has to be the most common question for those implementing a new virtual infrastructure (VI)  – “how do we back up our virtual machines?” There are certainly plenty of choices. A company could stay with the (most commonly found in physical environments) system of agent based tape backups, implement VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), implement a third party disk to disk product, or rely on SAN array snapshots. Most likely they will end up with a hybrid solution involving many of these choices. There is not an easy and consistent answer. It’s a company by company decision.

Luckily several posts have recently been published on TechTarget.com sites SearchDataBackup and SearchVMware that tackle the topic of comparing the software based VMware VM  backup alternatives and offer a lot of information for those evaluating the choices. I thought I would summarize these links since they have caught my attention over the last several weeks. Finally I link to a post about the unique advantages of SAN array backups for a hardware based backup comparison.

Readers should be aware that VMware’s Data Recovery (vDR) product has been updated since the posts linked in this summary were written. Although there are some new features introduced, the implementation requirements have not changed and therefore the content of these posts remain relevant.

Although I’ve covered what VI admins need to know about VCB in the past, I am not covering the product in this post. Check some of my other VCB posts for more information.

Software backup products

A review of VMware disk-to-disk backup apps: Veeam, Vizioncore, PHD Virtual and VDR

Eric Siebert has provided the most recent post, but it’s a great one to start with. Siebert gives a great overview of the 4 major options in the disk to disk / software category: Veeam Backup, Vizioncore vRanger, PHD’s esXpress, and then VMware’s own Data Recovery plugin. Read the entire post, but I’m providing a copy of his summary of features table.

I noticed the table has an N/A in the esXpress column for the “Requires Service Console Agents” row. As recently as VMworld 2009,  the esXpress product did require a lightweight agent running in the Service Console for management purposes as I reported in one of my VMworld Booth Talk posts. Maybe this has now changed for the 3.6.7 version covered in Siebert’s post.

A review of VMware disk-to-disk backup apps: Veeam, Vizioncore, PHD Virtual and VDR

Comparing the top virtual infrastructure backup tools

Gabrie van Zanten actually set up a test environment and gives a hands on report of all of the same products before Siebert covered them in his overview post. Read each of the following links to get a test run of using each solution without having to do it yourself!

• Veeam Backup and Replication 3.1
• Vizioncore vRanger Pro 4 Data Protection Platform
• PHD Virtual Technologies’ esXpress 3.6 VMware Backup
• VMware Data Recovery 1.0

van Zanten’s Veeam post has been updated with a column about Veeam’s subsequent release of version 4.

van Zanten’s series of posts also includes response posts from the vendors after each product review. These response posts offer both additional information as well as vendor development roadmap and direction. Be sure to read those as well. You’ll see the links at the end of each post.

Hardware Backups

Array-based backup advantages in a VMware virtual infrastructure

Steve Kaplan starts off by mentioning Siebert’s summary, but his post adroitly makes a VI design point that admins who implement software (or disk to disk) back up solutions need to consider.

“The primary challenge faced by software backup solutions is their inability to offload impact from hosts, a capability that becomes imperative as VM consolidation ratios increase. Applications relying on host CPU cycles and disk IO to facilitate backup compete for those shared resources with the production workload.”

Kaplan’s points are valid. He specifically mentions NetApp’s SMVI as an example of a backup solution that doesn’t impact the ESX hosts and adds additional application level capabilities that the software options don’t have. Sticking with the NetApp Management Products example, the added application intelligence provides integration:

• with vCenter in the SMVI product to ensure quiesced VM backups.
• with Exchange in the SM for Exchange product to allow information store backups and mailbox restores
• with SQL and Oracle with their respective SM products to allow database backup and restore

I’m most familiar with NetApp. Please feel free to comment with other storage vendor hardware backup solutions that also provide similar advantages over the software based VM backup options.

I’ll point out that all of the software backup products can leverage Microsoft VSS for application consistency during backups, but cannot provide similar application specific backups. I’ll also mention that neither hardware nor software VM backup products can create a Microsoft System State backup – a point I feel any server admin should be aware of.

As I mentioned earlier, the VM backup solution is not an easy or consistent choice from company to company. Factors such as budget, admin skill set, service level agreements, recovery point objective, and other business objectives can all influence the final design decisions. Often a migration to virtual infrastructure forces a company to consider tiering their servers and then deciding on which form of VM backup makes the most sense for each tier of VMs.

Here is my video of the GesaltIT Tech Field Day Party at The Computer History Museum in San Jose, CA. It’s not exactly high quality work, but provides some good images of the museum, the event and people, the presentation of the "thank you" gift to Stephen Foskett, and then Foskett’s appreciation speech for the event organizers and sponsors.

Sorry about the shaky video and frequent unfocused shots. I tried to edit out as much as possible without making the video hard to understand. Consider this my “Blair Rich” style of filming – except there are no “up my nostrils” angles. (if you saw the movie you’ll hopefully get that joke!)

GestaltIT Tech Field Day 1 Party from Rich Brambley on Vimeo.

I’ve also created a Vimeo album of all the Tech Field Day videos I could find. Check it out for several other of the attendees videos as well.

The video (in my video) on the screen was created by Marc Farley and Sunshine Mugrabi to set up our presentation of Foskett’s gift. Now, that’s a great video! I’ve embedded it here in this post, but it’s real home is on the StorageRap blog. Watch it too and see what everyone was laughing at!