VMware Site Recovery Manager overview August 30, 2009
Posted by Steve in BCP, Virtualization.Tags: BCP, virtualisation
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VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is a disaster recovery technology that allows VMware ESX environments to be replicated to a secondary site. The ability to move protected virtual servers between sites quickly and easily takes away a lot of the difficulty associated with implementing a Disaster Recovery (DR) solution. SRM does require a significant investment in hardware and high performance links (fibre is recommended) between sites making it a solution for larger sites.
SRM leverages SAN to SAN replication technology to keep up to date copies of the production Virtual Servers at the recovery site. Any changes made to production servers are replicated in real-time to the recovery site. The recovery site has VMware host servers with Virtual Servers in a shutdown state, in even of a failure at the production site, these servers are started (manually or automatically). SRM uses plug-ins to manage the underlying SAN storage environment simplifying management of the total solution.
Testing and validation of the recovery site is often one of the most complexed and often difficult parts of managing a DR site. One of the best features of SRM is the testing functionality. This allows the recovery site to be tested without shutting down the production environment. VLAN’s are used to isolate the recovery site during the test. This lowers the risks and costs associated with testing the site.
Recovery time is essentially the time taken to boot up the recovery site. Multiple protection groups can be created and started in a predefined order. Within a protection group, servers can be give priorities e.g. Active Directory starts before Exchange servers which start before Citrix and Blackberry.
Basic requirements:
- Two VMware farms (a production farm and a recovery farm)
- Two VMware vCentre servers (one at each site)
- Two SAN’s with replication between sites (a wide range of SAN’s are supported)
SRM can fill a big part of the Disaster Recovery jigsaw and should be considered by any organisation with a VMware environment and DR needs. It is a competitive solution in terms of functionality and low on going management costs. It does require high performance data links between sites so ensure you can get and afford those services at the start of the planning process.
Business Continuity August 18, 2009
Posted by Steve in BCP.Tags: BCP
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Business Continuity is a popular topic at the moment and is high on the list of priorities for businesses around the globe. Business Continuity is about ensuring your business continues to function in event of a disruption (foreseen or unforeseen). Many people think about the stereotypical disasters e.g. building catches fire, earthquake or even terrorist attack. The reality is the around 80% of computer system downtime is actually the result of the people who run the computer system i.e. your IT people and not terrorists.
So what should you do to ensure business can continue in the event of an “IT disaster”?
Before you begin make sure the basics are right
- ensure you have good backups. This is your first line of defence.
- ensure your servers are in a protected environment. UPS, computer friendly environment, secure room etc
- ensure your IT staff know what they are doing and act in the interest of your business.
Develop a Business Continuity Plan
- identify and document your key business processes e.g. order processing, banking
- identify the things those processes identified in step 1 depend on
- work out your threshold for pain i.e. how long can you live without each process
- calculate the business cost if that business process is not available e.g. lost sales, delayed payments etc
- document what you will do if the process is disrupted e.g. manual processing, alternative process
Following these basic steps you will soon get an idea of where your business is vulnerable and how long you can continue before the pain threshold is reached. Businesses with large suppliers or customers should consider getting those partner organisations involved in the plan as they may also be affected if disaster strikes.
One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to Business Continuity, some businesses are happy to ride out a short outage and have manual processes while others require a duplication of IT infrastructure. Compliance with regulations is also an important consideration.
From a technical point of view, a number of technologies can be used to build the IT components of a Business Continuity solution. Virtualisation allows portability of servers and applications. Replication technologies allow data to be copied to a secondary location. Remote access technologies allow employees to work from outside the office. Backup technology can also be an important component of the solution.
Knowing what to do when a disaster occurs is a big part of BCP. Being prepared will reduce the time it takes to recover and reduces panic. It is important to test often and update your plan where necessary.
How to shutdown a C3000 Blade Enclosure August 15, 2009
Posted by Steve in c3000.Tags: c3000
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A frequent search term on my blog relates to how to turn off an HP C3000 Blade Enclosure.
Here is the basic procedure:
- Shutdown any server blades in the enclosure e.g. via the Operating System.
- Logon to the C3000′s Onboard Administrator (OA) from a remote computer using the OA web interface.
- In the OA menu choose either Shutdown or Reboot.
Information on configuring the OA can be found here Configuring HP C3000 Onboard Administrator
Note that you can also use iLO to power on/off individual blades in the enclosure remotely.
Samoan IT&C August 13, 2009
Posted by Steve in Uncategorized.1 comment so far
I have just returned from a holiday in the beautiful South Pacific nation of Western Samoa. The holiday was relaxing and I did my best to avoid even thinking about technology but as we all know, it’s pretty hard to avoid at times. Here’s a short an incomplete review of IT in Samoa.
First thing I noticed (other than the airport transport van running over a pig as we raced across the Island to our accommodation along a windy, narrow and potholed road) was that Samoa has a modern GSM cellphone network and almost every Samoan you meet has one, two or even three cellphones with them at all times. I even saw one guy with a Blackberry Bold in hand, crossing a busy street in Apia (the capital) with a hand woven basket full of coconuts in the other. Unfortunately my Vodafone Palm Treo connected painlessly but I made sure email sync was disabled!
Internet is very expensive, a 5GB broadband plan costs around $US400 per month, according to a poster in the local ISP’s window. The only internet cafe outside the capital I saw had 5 PC’s with dialup and a charge of around $US2 for 5 minutes. I avoided temptation, but I overheard a guy saying the baud rate was around 19200. So that explains the total lack of Samoan’s using Facebook!
The next major issue is the digital camera running out of memory, battery or both! I found myself helping a tourist copy photos from his camera to a USB stick on a PC that was handed down from Moses or perhaps Noah. The good news is if you find a PC they generally have power, the bad news is the often they have neither. Remember of course that the digital camera is the one piece of technology that can be taken on holiday without guilt.
A tropical down pour on my last day caused me to stumble across a poor soul trying to connect his laptop to a wireless network. I suspect from his accent that he thought the entire world drove Chevy Pickup trucks with gun racks. His mate said to him “I think you need to run a registry cleaner to fix it”, I thought to myself, “perhaps you should find a country with wireless internet”…I had a cold beer and successfully overcame the urge to help.
The lovely flight attendant on the way home announced “our new inflight entertainment system is better than ever, and available right now”. Cool, found a movie and started to watch. A few minutes before the end and everything froze. To fix the issue, the device had to be rebooted. I sat for 10 minutes as Redhat Linux booted complete with several file not found errors. Suddenly I starting thinking about work. The system froze again with a message saying “please wait”. I never did see the end of the movie. So Linux can crash too! Perhaps I won’t grow that ponytail I was dreaming about between snorkling and cocktails…
Home again, download the camera, upload photos to Facebook, email my mum to say I’m alive and suntanned, login to Online banking to check the damage on my VISA, send a couple of tweets and check the back log of work emails. Perhaps the Samoan’s have it right, they don’t need technology to survive, unlike me.
Today is my last day off before returning to work. Back to serious stuff next post!
Offline in Samoa August 2, 2009
Posted by Steve in Uncategorized.add a comment
I’m off to Western Samoa for a holiday. This means I will be swapping my laptop and internet connection for a pair of jandals and a good book (Seven Troop by Andy MacNab). I won’t be completely technology free, I am taking my trusty Canon EOS 400D with 2 x 4GB memory cards and a spare battery pack.
I started wondering what internet on this relatively small country in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is like. The answer is very very expensive! www.samoa.ws Rates and Deals page gives you a good idea. The rates are in Samoa’s currency, the exchange rate to the New Zealand dollar is 1.65 and the $NZ is 0.65 to the $US (today at least). Time to break out Excel 2010! Distance, limited infrastructure and small market size are obvious issues for low cost internet in the South Pacific.
Enough about that, who needs the internet when you are staying a resort with a swim up bar, beautiful white sand beaches, sea turtles and a speed limit of 40km/h in town and 55km/h on the open road. I will write again in two weeks!
Cheers and pass the sunscreen
Steve
