Blog posts tagged with 'fault tolerance'

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.

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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