Aaron Delp’s BladeVault.info

I was fortunate enough this week to attend the Symantec Storage Conference in San Jose, CA. The presentations were great and the knowledge presented was first rate. I attended two presentations/demonstrations in particular that I wanted to share impressions:

Symantec/Veritas Clustering Services (VCS) for VMWare

• This product is an agent that is loaded into the Service Console on ESX and also optionally as an agent in the ESX guest machines.
• VCS takes the place of VMWare High Availability (it must be disabled if VCS is in place) but is complementary to VMWare DRS.
• The product protects you against many more types of failures, including guest OS failures, than VMWare HA and looked really solid.
• You can extend the cluster remotely for disaster recovery purposes on supported storage platforms.
• I spoke to many partners that are already selling/installing this product and it had a good reputation at the conference.

There are two big things that keep me from recommending the product right now. ESX 3.5 isn’t supported and NetApp Storage isn’t supported until Update 2 of the product later this year. The product is expected in 3Q but until that time I really don’t have a lot of use for the product in my accounts. But, if you are using a supported storage platform, your farm is ESX 3.0X, and you are having pains with VMWare HA, it is worth a look!

Symantec NetBackup for VMWare

I can see why this product won best in show at VMWorld this year. NetBackup 6.5.1 looked incredible on ESX.

• No configuration of VCB needed. Just load VCB on the proxy server and NetBackup will hook into it. Anybody who has configured VCB by hand editing text files knows this is great .
• More than one “instance” of VCB open at a time. This allows for multiple streams and faster backups/restores .
• The ability to perform both VMDK and file level backups in the same pass. The competitors all support this as well, but with two passes and twice the storage, one for the vmdk, one for the files.
• Restores are a piece of cake because the NetBackup database is proxy aware and knows which VM the files came from
• No software loaded on ESX hosts or agents
• Traffic flows over the SAN, not the LAN
• Very minimal overhead to ESX server to perform backup (take a snapshot and monitor the re-do log)
• Many other features that I can’t think of right now…. As you can see I was impressed by the product!