VIOPS: Proven Practices for Deploying and Managing VMware : Document List - All Communities

Install and Configure SQL Express 2005 for use with Site Recovery Manager V4

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:20:59 GMT

Introduction

VMware Site Recovery Manager is the first disaster recovery product aimed squarely at the virtualized world and while plenty of documentation exists around the product itself, not quite as much is available when it comes to dependent components. One of these is the backend database needed to support SRM and how it should be configured.

In the world of corporate IT there are developers, infrastructure folks and dbas and generally speaking there’s not much cross-pollination of knowledge between the tribes. But as an infrastructure specialist, I can’t always wait for a dba. Courses, POCs and Lab setups are all scenarios where the specialist doesn’t require a full blown, supported database but rather has a focus on quickly deploying a supported SRM configuration using freely available components (such as SQL Express 2005) that will work without having to digest 700 pages of SQL education.

This is intended to be just such a document. The goal is to produce a configuration guide which will absolutely work every time and which requires zero knowledge of database systems or SQL.

Intended Audience

VMware Certified Professionals (VCPs), database administrators and IT specialists configuring SRM for lab or POC use

Outline

1. Install SQL Express 2005 and Management Studio 2005 including pre-requisites

2. Enabling TCP remote connections and specifying static connection ports.

3. Creating the SRM database including necessary schemas, user ids and privileges

4. Create the necessary ODBC DSN connection profiles.

Author

Rob Nourse is a Senior Consultant with VMware Canada with twenty years of enterprise infrastructure experience focused primarily on the Canadian Banking sector. He is a member of the VMware Business Continuance Practice and holds a degree in Computer Science and Systems. Rob has worked for IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems in their UNIX divisions as well as four of the five Canadian banks. You can see more of Rob’s work at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rnourse

Resources

Rob has very few resources…

Disclaimer

You use this proven practice at your discretion. VMware and the author do not guarantee any results from the use of this proven practice. This proven practice is provided on an as-is basis and is for demonstration purposes only.

Title of proven practice goes here

Install and Configure SQL Express 2005 for use with Site Recovery Manager V4

Proven Practice: Enabling SSL Communication between VMware® vCenter Site Recovery Manager and NetApp® FAS Storage Arrays

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:58:20 GMT

Introduction

The attached document contains the steps involved in setting up SSL communication between NetApp storage arrays & VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager.

Outline

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.0 is a disater recovery product which uses array replication technologies to failover from one site to another.

This document focuses on securing the communication between Site Recovery Manager & NetApp FAS arrays by configuring SSL on both the array and on NetApp's Storage Replication Adapter (SRA).

Author:

Cormac Hogan

Global Support Services (GSS)

VMware

Resources:

Disclaimer:

ESXi Security Events Log Monitoring

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:42:50 GMT

Introduction

The attached document goes over a set of security-related events and how they are logged on ESXi 4.0. The focus is on actions initiated directly on the ESXi host, since these would bypass vCenter for the most part. The ideal case of course is to perform all actions through vCenter, since this automatically records events in the vCenter Events table, but there are certain cases in which direct access to the ESXi host is involved. Use this information to help you configure your log collection system to alert you to security-related events of interest

Intended Audience

VI and Security Admins

Author

Charu Chaubal, Sr. Technical Marketing Architect, VMware

Disclaimer

Steps to setup VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.0 with NetApp NAS Replications

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:45:09 GMT

Introduction

The attached document contains the steps involved in setting up NetApp storage arrays for use with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager.

Outline

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.0 is a disater recovery product which uses array replication technologies to failover from one site to another.

This particular document looks at one particular vendor (NetApp) and uses their FAS simulator. However the steps are also applicable to their standard arrays.

This document also focuses on configuring a new feature introduced in SRM 4.0, namely NAS (NFS) replictions.

The document will take you through the replication and snapshot setup steps.

Authors:

Cormac Hogan

Global Support Services (GSS)

VMware

Resources:

Disclaimer:

Steps to setup VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.0 with EMC Celerra NAS Replications

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:44:40 GMT

Introduction

The attached document contains the steps involved in setting up theEMC Celerra storage arrays for use with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager.

Outline

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.0 is a disater recovery product which uses array replication technologies to failover from one site to another.

This particular document looks at one particular vendor (EMC) and one particular array model (Celerra).

This document also focuses on configuring a new feature introduced in SRM 4.0, namely NAS (NFS) replictions.

The document will take you through the replication and snapshot setup steps using only the command line interface (CLI).

Authors:

Cormac Hogan

Global Support Services (GSS)

VMware

Resources:

Disclaimer:

Steps to setup VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.0 with IBM SVC

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:33:00 GMT

Introduction

The attached document contains the steps involved in setting up the IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) storage arrays for use with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager.

Outline

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.0 is a disater recovery product which uses array replication technologies to failover from one site to another.

This particular document looks at one particular vendor (IBM) and one particular array model (SVC).

The document will take you through the replication and snapshot setup steps.

Authors:

Cormac Hogan

Global Support Services (GSS)

VMware

Resources:

Disclaimer:

Creating a file or fullVM VCB backup on a disk by disk basis

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 03:00:25 GMT

Introduction

This proven practice describes a technique for completing a VCB backup for large disks.

Intended Audience

Storage Team, Operations Team

Outline

Link to process and script

Author

Jamie Morrison

Resources

viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1587.

Disclaimer

Creating a file or fullVM VCB backup on a disk by disk basis

Typically a full VM based backup of C: is required for most virtual machines for bare metal recovery. Large data disks may be backed up using other methods such as specific agents (e.g. Exchange, SQL) and can be marked as independent, so as not to be included in the snapshot for the fullVM based backup.

The issue occurs with file servers that may have data disks of hundreds of gigabytes or terabytes that are ideal candidates for a VCB file based backup, but cannot run a full VM based backup due to the size of the data disk, and due to the data disk not being able to be marked as independent, otherwise the file based backup is not possible.

Creating a file or fullVM VCB backup on a disk by disk basis
http://theether.net/kb/100131

Inspired by:

http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/jturver/2008/01/24/vcb-how-to-backup-a-selec ted-specific-disk-or-disks-using-vcbexport-and-a-useful-script-to-do-it

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Performance and Best Practices

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 18:38:30 GMT

Introduction

In this paper we discuss VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 1.0 performance, various dimensions on which the recovery time depends, high-latency networks, and tips on architecting recovery plans to minimize recovery time.

Intended Audience

VMware Certified Professionals (VCPs) and IT admins in configuring SRM for disaster recovery

Outline

The goal of this whitepaper is to provide you with Site Recovery Manager performance data and recommendations so that you can architect an efficient recovery plan that minimizes the recovery time for your environment.

This whitepaper addresses various dimensions on which the recovery time depends:
• Number of virtual machines and protection groups associated with a recovery plan
• Virtual machine to protection group relation
• Recovery site performance in a cluster
• Configuration of various recovery plan parameters
• Priority assignment of virtual machines in the recovery plan
• High latency network between protected and recovery sites

Furthermore, best practices in applicable areas are suggested so that you can optimize the recovery time using Site Recovery Manager.

Author

Aalap Desai is a MTS Performance Engineer at VMware. He has been working on the performance project for VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager. Aalap received his Masters in Computer Science from Syracuse University.

Resources

You can find this document at http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10057

Disclaimer

SAP Solutions on VMware® Infrastructure: Reducing Infrastructure Costs at Thales Rail Signaling Solutions, Inc. - Technical Case Study

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:22:54 GMT

Introduction

This is a recently published SAP on VMware customer technical case study. Thales Rail Signaling Solutions, Inc. decided to bring its SAP environment in-house, moving to the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter x64 Edition operating system and the Oracle 10 Database running on VMware® Infrastructure. After migration, the company realized 40 percent cost savings, up to four times performance improvement, higher availability, full redundancy, and cost-effective disaster recovery options.

Intended Audience

SAP Technical Architects and SAP customers interested in migrating to x86 and VMware platform

Outline

Executive Summary

The Business Need

Hosting Solutions Considered

The Business Solution

Authors and Key Partners

Author

Thales Rail Signalling Solutions Inc

Illumiti Inc.

Resources

You can find this document at

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/partners/sap/sap-virtualization-thales-rail-sign aling-solutions-wp.pdf

Disclaimer

SAP Solutions on VMware: High Availability Whitepaper

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 19:05:47 GMT

Introduction

VMware High Availability (HA) has helped our SAP customers achieve their uptime requirements and meet their target SLAs. VMware vSphere 4 introduces VMware Fault Tolerance (FT), a feature that allows a virtual machine to continue running even when the underlying physical server fails. It is a software solution that runs on commodity hardware and does not require any modifications to the guest operating system or SAP applications running inside the virtual machine. This new FT feature can provide further protection to SAP single points of failure with zero downtime. An ideal candidate for this feature is the lightweight central services component - SAP enqueue can be protected in the event of hardware failure with no loss of locks without the complexity of configuring replicated enqueue and clustering.

VMware FT and VMware HA satisfy the requirements of different HA scenarios for SAP customers. which are described and compared in this paper to help our customers architect highly available SAP solutions in a VMware virtualized environment.

Intended Audience

SAP Basis Adminsitrators; SAP technical Architects; SIs/VACs/Infrastructure Partners involved in deploying SAP on VMware solutions

Outline

Introduction

vSphere Overview

VMware Fault Tolerance

Background on High Availability for SAP Solutions

VMware HA

Clustering SAP Solutions in Virtual Machines with MSCS

SAP Central Services and VMware Fault Tolerance

SAP Database/Central Instance and VMware Fault Tolerance

Summary

Author

Vas Mitra

SAP Solutions Architect

VMware Alliances

Resources

You can find this document at http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/SAP_vsphere_high_availability.pdf