Essential Technology: A GCS Blog

Most of our clients choose between an Entry Level or Mid-Level SAN, as described in Part 1 of this Buyer's Guide. In this post I'll identify the features that differentiate those two classes of SANs.

Clustering: Clustered SANs operate like clustered servers. If one fails the other takes over immediately. This is only available in the Mid-Level products such as HP Lefthand, Dell Equallogic, etc. Only HP's Lefthand offers true clustering out of the box. The minimum order for a Lefthand SAN is two completely separate units.

Thin Provisioning: Mid-level SANs allow  you to oversubscribe storage by allocating storage to a volume without reserving that storage. If you create a 100GB volume but only use 40GB, the remaining 60GB is free to be allocated to another volume. This feature is essential in maximizing the storage efficiency of a SAN.

Offsite Replication: Replication between SANs is the foundation for an excellent DR solution. Replicate all data and VMs to another site. Many of the mid-level SANs offer this solution but in some it is a licensed add-on. HP's Lefthand includes scheduled replication at no additional cost but real time replication and automated failover is an additional license fee.

Snapshots: Snapshotting technology is an on-array backup method that utilizes a relatively small amount of disk space. This is possible to restore entire volumes quickly without relying on external storage.

De-duplification: Long an enterprise only feature, integrated de-duplification is making its way into mid-level SANs. This can dramatically increase the efficiency of storage but can have a significant performance cost.

Live Migration is the killer app in Hyper-V R2, which is due out in mere weeks. Microsoft finally can match VMWare feature by feature in many environments - or can they? If you don't want backups, Live Migration works fine. What? Again, please? If you're using Data Protection Manager 2007, you will not be able to backup VMs using Clustered Shared Volumes. Clustered Shared Volumes are required to utilize Live Migration.

Fortunately DPM 2010 released to Beta on 9/29. Not only does it add support for VMs using Clustered Shared Volumes but it also enables mobile laptop backups. The mobile laptop backups work over a VPN and are designed for the user off the LAN. DPM to DPM replication offers a poor man's disaster recovery solution.

Data Protection Manager is by far the best backup solution for Hyper-V virtualized environments. It includes brick level backup of Exchange, a SQL agent, and a Sharepoint agent. It integrates to Shadowcopy for backups of the VMs. All DPM agents are included in the System Center Server Management Suite, though you have to buy a seperate DPM server license.

Hold your breath. Live Migration is coming, just not quite as fast as the marketing indicates.

Back in August, I introduced the various components of the System Center family. I also pointed out that the cost would of licensing each product, or even licensing a single product for multiple virtual machines, would be prohibitive for most smaller organizations. However, Microsoft has responded with the Systems Center Management Suite license that includes the licenses to manage multiple virtual machines using the full System Center family for a far more approachable price.  Here is what is included:

·         A license to run the Virtual Machine Manager server.

·         Management license for:

o   Data Protection Manager (DPM)

o   Operations Manager

o   Configuration Manager

o   Virtual Machine Manager (VMM)

This license is sold in two flavors:

·         The Enterprise flavor is licensed per physical server and allows you to manage 4 virtualized operating systems on that server. 

·         The Datacenter flavor is licensed per CPU (a minimum of 2 processors) but allows you to manage an UNLIMITED number of virtualized operating systems on a physical server.  When licensed for two CPU’s the Datacenter license is only about 25% more than Enterprise, and most likely if you have more than 4 VM’s you’ll have two CPU’s and will save money by going with the Datacenter edition.

But for small environments the biggest value of the license comes when using DPM for backup. But to explain the benefit let’s use a small virtual environment example. 

We have a Hyper-V server with 4 virtual machines:

·          A domain controller/file server

·         An Exchange 2007 server

·         A SQL server

·         A SharePoint server

The DPM protection agent also comes in two flavors:

·         Standard Data Protection which allows you to perform basic file level protection of a server.

·         Enterprise Data Protection which is required to provide protection for advanced applications like Exchange, SQL, SharePoint and Hyper-V

One of the benefits that drove this small organization was the ability to backup an entire virtual machine, which means we would need an enterprise DPM license for the Hyper-V server. When a Hyper-V server is protected with the enterprise license you are also permitted to deploy a standard DPM license inside any of its virtual machines. This allows us to backup the domain controller and file server, but the other servers would each require their own Enterprise protection license. So we would need 4 enterprise licenses.  Similarly, to properly protect all these servers with alternate backup products would require a special Hyper-V agent, SQL Agent, SharePoint Agent and Exchange Agent.

But, if this company was to purchase the Enterprise Server Management Suite they would be entitled to all the Enterprise DPM licenses they needed. And because of the new pricing, they would pay less.  Just 3 enterprise DPM licenses would cost more than the enterprise suite license. And on top of that you get management licenses for all the other System Center products.

There are two gotchas with this management suite:

·         The only System Center Server license included is the VMM server license. So you still need to purchase the server licenses for DPM, Operations Manager and Configuration Manager to take advantage of the management licenses included in the suite.

·         Despite all being part of the same product family, the System Center server product cannot all run on the same server.  Only VMM and DPM can coexist.

Because of these limitations it is likely that smaller environments will only take advantage of the VMM and DPM components of the suite, but it still offers a compelling value to consider.

Last week Microsoft published the first release candidate of the new Exchange Server 2010. This is one of the final milestones in the roadmap for final release early next year. As with any new update the biggest question is what is in the upgrade that makes the expense and hassle of an upgrade worthwhile. This is especially true for users that have recently upgraded to Exchange 2007.  I’m pleased to say that while there are numerous improvements in Exchange 2010, there are several that standout and make a compelling argument for upgrade.

At the top of the list are the improvements made for high availability.  Exchange 2007 offered a number of different high availability (HA) options (SCR, CCR, and SCC).  Standby Continuous Replication offered relatively inexpensive DR functionality for Exchange, but failover was a manual process. CCR, or Cluster Continuous Replication, and SCC, or Single Copy Cluster, allowed for automatic failover within a single site but required installing only the mailbox role inside the cluster. This meant a minimum of three Exchange licenses to achieve high availability, four if you wanted redundancy for the other Exchange roles. In addition to that expense, the configuration was a very manual process that required a great deal of time.

In Exchange 2010, Microsoft has eliminated many of the prior HA configuration in favor of a new concept called database availability groups (DAG).  DAG allows for a fully redundant configuration with onsite or offsite replication. Microsoft has changed the architecture of Exchange so that the mailbox database is no longer tied to a specific server. DAG permits a mailbox database to be replicated to up 16 different servers. What’s more the configuration has been highly simplified and can be fully managed from the Exchange Management Console.  You can even configure a single server for DAG and then add a second server at a later date without reconfiguring.

In addition to DAG Microsoft has improved the consistency of mail delivery with the concept of Shadow Redundancy.  Where DAG applies to the availability of mailbox database, Shadow Redundancy handles providing redundancy for messages during the transportation process. Basically each server in the transportation process holds onto a copy of a message until it receives confirmation that the message was received by the next “hop” in the process.  If confirmation isn’t received the message can be resubmitted to the next server or an alternate server if one is available. Unfortunately, Shadow Redundancy can only be used up to the point the mail is forwarded to a server that doesn’t support this functionality. But, it is a big step forward in ensuring consistent mail delivery within the Exchange routing environment.

Aside from high availability, there are numerous other improvements built into Exchange 2010. Some highlights include optimization for handling large individual mailboxes (10GB and larger), further improvements to Outlook Web Access (now known as Outlook Lite), and new message archiving and compliance functionality out of the box.  These are valuable improvements that I’ll expand on at a later date. But, email has become a mission critical application in organization large and small these improvements to increase the uptime of Exchange are by far the most compelling.

The Xilocore offsite backup solution came recommended from another VAR out of state. When I saw them at the CompTIA Breakaway Summit I made a point to spend some time at the booth. If you're not familar with Xilocore, it serves the same purpose as an offsite SAN replication of VMs and data without needing the offsite SAN, servers, data center, firewall, bandwidth, etc. An onsite appliance is installed that makes a local backup and then replicates the data offsite. In the event of a server failure you can run the VM on the Xilcore box locally. If a more serious or prolonged outage occurs, Xilocore can stand up your VMs at their data center and provide Citrix-based access to those servers. Turnaround times are offered at 24 and 48 hour intervals.

I looked at this solution in comparison to a proposal I was working on that featured offsite SAN replication with offsite server hardware for DR. This was a Hyper-V platform with System Center Management Suite (including DPM). Xilocore had a compelling offer but this client already had collocation, an MPLS WAN and gobs of spare hardware coming after the virtualization project completes. Though not a fit for this client, I'll circle back and investigate more on upcoming opportunities. I'll be sure to post the outcome.

Reluctantly, I've become a big fan of Avaya's IP Office product. My early impressions of this product were not favorable. However it's mobility and remote connection features have developed into best-in-class features. The IP Office has always been very reliable. Finally, it is price competitive from ten - several hundred handsets. The IP Office is getting even better with the impending release of the 5.0 software upgrade. What's new in 5.0?

Failover: IP Offices can now failover between switches either geographically or within the same location. This is only supported with IP handsets.

Exchange 2007 Integration: Voicemail integration is now supported.

Web Based Telephony: Many users that previously relied on Phone Manager Lite will be able to access similar functionality over the web.

Conference Bridge: The conference bridge can be upgraded from 64 ports to 128 ports.

Small Community Network: IP Offices can now be installed at up to 32 individual locations and networked for 3 or 4 digit dialing between locations.

SIP Endpoints: Though I'm sure this feature has been heavily requested its impact on the market will be negligible. Additional licenses are required per SIP handset. Avaya's 16xx handsets rival SIP handsets in price, do not require an additional license and provide more features.

Licensing: Avaya has simplified the licensing by bundling user and phone switch licenses by user type. There are now three types of switch licenses. Essential uses the Embedded voicemail, which now includes Dial by Name directory. Preferred adds Voicemail Pro functionality. Advanced bundles call center reporting, recorded call management, conditional call routing and more. In addition to the switch licenses there are six types of user licenses - Mobile Worker, Tele Worker, Power User, Receptionist, Customer Service Agent and Customer Service Supervisor. Mobile Worker is essentially for remote extensions without any telephony or handset use. Tele Worker includes all licenses for remote IP phone or telecommuter access. Power User bundles Mobile and Tele Worker licenses. Receptionist adds the soft console application.

Support: IP Office 5 is only supported on the 500, 412 and 406V2 switches.