Blog posts tagged with 'high availability'

One of the new features of XenServer 5 is High Availability. Check out these screen shots to get a close up view of how to configure High availability in XenServer 5.

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You can find much more information at www.XenServer5.com.

Citrix has announced Citrix XenServer 5.

As Peter Levine wrote earlier today, XenServer 5 is built to be "the industry's most comprehensive and open, bare metal virtualization solution on the planet".

Below you can see a brief presentation that cover's the newest features of Citrix XenServer 5 (presentation hosted at SlideShare.net). After reviewing the slides, you can take a look at which features are are available in each version of Citrix XenServer 5.

Below you can see the features available in each release -

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You can find much more information at www.XenServer5.com.

Citrix and Marathon Technologies announced today an expanded partnership to more tightly integrate Marathon's everRun solution with Citrix XenServer .

the press release

I have been impressed with Marathon's solution for quite a while, and have blogged about it several times. The most recent post included several links to YouTube video demos of both their XenServer solution and their XenApp solution. Read it here. You can read my interview with Jerry Melnick, the CTO of Marathon technologies, here.

Marathon Technologies is a sponsor of Citrix Synergy, so you will be able to see this solution in person at the event. Click here to register for Citrix Synergy.

The next virtualization vendor on up in my series of posts digging down into CIO Magazine's "10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch" is Marathon Technologies.
Here is what CIO Magazine has to say about Marathon -

As stated by CIO Magazine, Marathon was awarded a Best of VMWorld award in 2007. This is a quote from Tech Target about Marathon and this award -

I have posted about Marathon before (such as this post about the video interview from iForum and this interview with the CTO Jerry Melnick . Those two posts give you some background on the technology. Tarry Singh of Virtualization for Everyone did an interview with Jerry Melnick in January.

Recently Marathon Technologies has posted a demo video on YouTube.

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Marathon's everRun v-Available gives you the only fault tolerant solution for virtual machines, and it is designed exclusively for Citrix XenServer. Recently, Marathon published a joint whitepaper with Citrix that dives down into this solution . You can download the paper here. You can run the Marathon v-Available ROI Calculator here.


Pricing: The pricing on Marathon Technologies v-Available everRun for Citrix XenServer is $2000 per server. Here is the math for buying a complete solution with XenServer -

Citrix XenServer Enterprise licenses at list-
2 X $3000=$6000

Marathon v-Available at list -

2 X $2000=$4000

Total = $10000 

For $10,000 you get a fault tolerant server virtualization solution that provides true fault tolerance  AND maximum uptime for your virtual machines on XenServer.  You contact Marathon for more info.



Marathon clearly has an excellent solution to provide true fault tolerance for virtual machines running on Citrix XenServer. Many people do not realize that Marathon Technologies also has a solution for Citrix XenApp. Gabe Carrejo on the Field Readiness team at Citrix recently did some testing regaiidng their solution for Citrix XenApp and shared with me the test videos he created.

Gabe has done excellent work in working with Marathon to build this environment and to record his results. He broke his test out into eight different scenarios, and created short videos for each.

In this first video, Gabe shows XenApp sessions (the video was made before the name change, so still uses the Presentation Server name) maintaining the  connection despite a hard drive failure on the primary node.

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In this next video, you see all the XenApp sessions over ICA stay up despite a network card failure on the primary server.

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Next, Gabe causes the primary server to completely fail and the load to migrate over to the secondary server. No XenApp sessions are lost during this failure and migration.

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Gabe then migrates the entire load back to the primary server with no session loss.

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One final video I would like to show you from testing done by Gabe. In this test, Gabe simulates 39 user sessions using EdgeSight for Load Testing. He causes the server to fail and all the sessions maintain the connection. .

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Here is a higher resolution version, but without the call outs (notes).

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Gabe created additional videos where he simulated the failure of different hard drives in each server and a combination of hard drives and network cards. You can watch these additional videos at http://youtube.com/user/CitrixBlogger.

As you can see, Marathon Technologies provides a truly fault tolerant solution for both Citrix XenServer and XenApp (and to XenApp running virtualized on XenServer).

Next up is Blue Lane.

Next up on CIO Magazine's "10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch" list is Platform Computing. I saw a demo of Platform Computing's solution at iForum, and met with some of their staff at Citrix Summit. I think VM Orchestrator is an excellent add-on to a Citrix XenServer deployment for those sites that require the added capabilities of Dynamic Resource Management and Restart HA.

CIO Magazine quoted Chris Wolf of the Burton Group -

Platform Computing has been involved in grid computing for 15 years. Their newest virtualization offering VM Orchestrator (VMO) is a Citrix XenServer Only solution.

Here is how Platform Computing describes VM Orchestrator (VMO) on their website -

VMO includes the following features -

• Multi-Host Dynamic Resource Management (DRM)Create policies; optimize your virtual environment - In the demo I saw at Summit, you have the ability to set nested policies based on CPU utilization, and move either the least loaded or most loaded VM. VMO is designed to avoid the VM pinball effect that can occur with other solutions when a virtual machine moves from server to server rapidly.
• Resource Aware High Availability (HA)Mitigate risk; minimize cost - The restart HA capability with VMO allows you to specify restart on any server in the resource pool. You do not have to set up a one - one relationship for HA. You can have one server in the pool available for restart HA for any server in the pool for instance.
• Accessibility from Anywhere Launch a browser; manage your environment With VMO, you have web based management for your entire XenServer deployment. While this management does not completely replace all the configuration and setup functions of XenCenter, it does give you the ability to do day to day management from a browser on any machine.
• Self-service Virtual Machine Management Give users more control; maintain control over resources This is an interesting feature that gives you the ability to allow specific user to subscribe to specific virtual machines or templates through the web based management tool (without access to other management functions). This could be extremely useful in a XenDesktop deployment.

VMO is delivered as a virtual appliance on XenServer, so it is very simple to get installed and running.

Dan Kusnetsky of ZDnet recently did a blog post on Platform Computing that provides additionally company background -

Platform Computing posted a page of links to demos of VMO v3 on their site at this link. On this page is a video that specifically covers the VMO  DRM load balancing policies. You can really get a good feel for the power of using a policy engine for DRM that gives you much more fine grained control on the migration of virtual machines than any other existing solution.

I did find one video by Peter Dyer (great guy) of Platform Computing on YouTube. 

At iForum, David Marshall of VMBlog.com interviewed Peter Dyer on VMO.

Platform joined the Citrix Alliance Program last year, and recently completed Citrix Ready certification.

Here is the pricing for VMO -

When VMO is combined with Citrix XenServer Enterprise, you get a complete server virtualization solution that includes XenMotion, Resource Pooling, Dynamic Resource Management, Pool Based Restart HA, and Web Based Management for somewhere between $4000 - $4800 per server, depending on whether you buy an annual or perpetual license (and no extra expense on management).

Next up on the list from CIO Magazine is Embotics...

One booth I visited in the XenSource Pavilion is Marathon Technologies. I can recall recommending their high availability solution to a number of customers back in the late 90 when I was still an independent consultant. Back then, the solution was hardware and software based. Now, Marathon solution is a completely software based high availability solution and runs on industry standard hardware. Marathon announced a new XenSource specific solution at VMWorld, and won Best of VMWorld for New Technolgoies . John Bara from XenSource (now part of the Virtualization Management Group at Citrix) said this about Marathon:

By integrating everRun with XenEnterprise, Marathon is enabling customers of any size to get simple, enterprise-grade virtualization solutions with FT-class application availability, said John Bara, vice president of marketing at XenSource. is another example of how XenSource is working with partners to ensure XenEnterprise seamlessly integrates as the virtualization platform for a wide-range of high-performance, best-in-class solutions._

In the demo I saw, the v-Available everRun solution from Marathon was able to handle a failure of a hard drive one side of the link and a network card on the other side and continue running. Unlike many other virtualization HA solutions, Marathon solution does not restart the VM after a failure on one side of the link. The Marathon is always running and can handle the failure of a single component of either side, or an entire VM on one side without any downtime. It makes for a very impressive demo.

That demo was of two servers on a LAN. The solutions also works over a WAN. I am still trying to get more info from Marathon Technologies to nail down what are the specific WAN requirements for this new offering. According to the Marathon FAQ the Split Site solution ( a different product) requires 10 ms of latency or less. Assuming has the same requirement, you cannot replicate a VM from a datacenter on the east coast to one on the west coast. According to a few docs I found on the Marathon website, the limit is 100 miles.

Here is a video I found on YouTube of an interview done by Virtual Strategy Magazine.

There was a virtualization webinar last week with Marathon CTO Jerry Melnick, the CTO of Citrix Virtualization Management Group Simon Crosby, and Chris Wolf from the Burton Group. Here is the webinar link .

Marathon has an excellent High Availability solution for virtual machines running on Citrix XenServer. If HA is requirement for you, check it out.

I have several more partner solutions to blog abut as I get time.

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The webinar entitled Making the Business Case for Virtualization It Not Just For Server Consolidation Anymoreis today at 12 noon EST.

UPDATE: If you missed the webinar, you can still watch the recording of the entire presentation at the link. Click on the link above, go through the short registration, and the click on the link to view the archived webinar.

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After my earlier blog post on the Best of VMWorld solution for high availability offered by Marathon Technologies, I have received numerous questions about the solution offered by Marathon Technologies specifically for XenServer. Jerry Melnick, the CTO of Marathon, graciously agreed to provide some background info on Marathon Technologies and answer a few other questions.

Barry Flanagan: Many Citrix customers may not be familiar with Marathon Technologies. Can you give us a brief history?

Jerry Melnick: Marathon was founded in 1993 by engineers responsible for developing Digital VAX FT fault tolerant systems. The team used this experience to develop the first software and networking technology that allowed multiple Wintel servers to operate as a single fault tolerant system. In 2003 the company migrated its technology to a software-only product that works with standard off-the-shelf Intel/AMD servers, unmodified Windows and standard, unmodified Windows applications.

Barry Flanagan: Your website describes everRun as Availability Software. What are the three things people show know about how your software solves the problem of unplanned downtime?

Jerry Melnick: First, we don say lightly. Our everRun software keeps critical applications available in industries where downtime equals big bucks, including process manufacturing, gaming, media and broadcasting, financial services and federal markets. We have over 1500 global customers including five of the top ten pharmaceutical manufacturers, four of the top five television networks in the US and over 1000 mid-market companies.

Second, we developed what we call our ComputeThru technology that keeps essential applications running through both network and disk I/O failures. That means they rarely, if ever, experience lost data, lost revenue, or lost productivity due to common system or network failures. And now we working closely with the Citrix to bring our proven availability software to virtual machines. Unlike existing availability solutions that add cost and complexity to the virtual environment, everRun VM is simple and reliable.

Third, everRun provides a much more simplified approach to server availability, whether they physical servers or virtual servers. It completely automates setup, configuration, fault detection and policy management. Automated setup and configuration eliminates the manual configuration other availability solutions require.

Barry Flanagan: Do you have any real world examples of companies who use your solutions?

Jerry Melnick: The world largest commodities exchange uses our software to ensure their pricing board information and order confirmation messages are always available, Wellcome Trust, the organization responsible for the sequencing of one-third of the human genome, uses everRun to guarantee high-availability of genomic data for its research users. And MAN AG, one of the Europe biggest and best truck manufacturers, uses everRun software to make sure all their employees in offices around Germany have continuous access to key applications and data. The division we work with is also a big Citrix customer. You can read about how they use everRun and Citrix software on our site.

Barry Flanagan: Do you have any numbers on the cost of downtime for specific industries?

Jerry Melnick: Here are some industry figures for key applications. Your mileage may vary.

Application Downtime Cost Per Hour
ERP 780,000
Supply Chain Management 660,000
E-Commerce 600,000
Internet Banking 420,000
Customer Service Center 220,000
Electronic Funds Transfer 210,000
Messaging/Email 60,000
Hospital Information System (avg. three hospital IDN with 1400 beds) 60,000
Hospital Information System (avg. single hospital with 500 beds) 15,840

We have an ROI calculator on our web site that can help you determine what downtime on your physical servers is costing your organization

Barry Flanagan: The November 28th webinar listed on your site talks about the Best of VMWorld approach to protecting virtual machines. How did Marathon win a Best of VMWorld award when the product is designed exclusively for Citrix XenServer?

Jerry Melnick: At VMworld, Mendel Rosenblum, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at VMware, highlighted hardware fault tolerance as one of the company three key technology initiatives. But according to Mendel, their solution is still in early development and won be out in the foreseeable future. On the other hand, we demonstrated everRun VM at the show, and we ship the industry first fault tolerant-class virtual machine software in Q1 of next year.

Barry Flanagan: What is different about this webinar? Why should someone working with virtualization technologies attend?

Jerry Melnick: Well, if you didn see the everRun VM showcase at VMworld or iForum, I be explaining how it works. IDC virtualization guru, John Humphreys, will share some real world numbers on virtualization savings based on customer surveys they conducted. And it a great opportunity to hear Simon Crosby (CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division of Citrix) talk about the new economics of server virtualization.

Barry Flanagan: What will an attendee learn from attending this webinar? Are there any takeaways?

Jerry Melnick: John will give you good guidance on how to evaluate and structure your virtualization business case for your management. We be providing attendees with a first chance to use a brand new virtualization and availability ROI calculator that will help make your case. And of course Simon will be thought-provoking as always.

UPDATE: I received pricing info back from Jerry and his team. The final pricing is not yet determined, but here is the TENTATIVE pricing info.

Marathon everRun VM integrated bundle (Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition v4 + everRun VM)

Dual socket: $4500 Quad socket: $9000

Marathon everRun VM only (for upgrading existing XenServer installations)

Dual socket: $2000 Quad socket: $4000

As stated above, this pricing is not yet written in stone.

Thanks to Jerry Melnick for answering our Seven Questions. There will be an opportunity to ask Jerry, John Humpreys and Simon Crosby more questions at the end of the webinar.

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