Whenever you are trying to come up with the best solution for physical to virtual (P2V) migrations, there are several things to consider. Depending on your downtime window, you sometimes have to get really creative. When the downtime window is very short, it also shortens the list of suitable methods to accomplish the P2V task. In that mix of options to have in your solution arsenal, Doubletake is a good one. I recently talked with Bob Roudebush from Doubletake about their new product suite.
Replication often happens at the hardware level with SAN mirroring but that can be costly or just not practical, depending on the project requirements. “Figuring out a way to replicate Exchange from one site to another is always a challenge. We do it with real time data replication with software. Because it’s software, some of the biggest benefits are the cost savings and no big costs with hardware.”
I asked about what host systems Doubletake works with currently and what is on their roadmap. “Our software works with virtual machines as well as physical. We’ve figured out with software what a SAN normally does. We have an edition of our product for ESX and one for Hyper-V, and XenServer is on the roadmap. The Linux version allows for block-level replication.”
Doubletake started out with a nice replication offering, but with this recent announcement, they’re seeking to become more. According to Bob, “The Company we’ve become over the years is much different than when we started. We aren’t just a point problem solver. We now have the ability to move data around in real time without the users knowing about it. For the first time, we are unveiling a workload product suite.”
The suite’s key capabilities include:
- Workload Portability (Double-Take Move): Move workloads between any combination of physical and virtual hardware (P2P, P2V, V2P or V2V) within datacenters for hardware refreshes, or across locations for datacenter migrations and consolidations.
- Workload Backup (Double-Take Backup): Continuously backup workloads and recover them on-demand to a new physical or virtual machine. Using CDP capabilities, recovery can also be done at the item level to any point in time.
- Workload Availability (Double-Take Availability): Ensure the availability of critical IT workloads for disaster recovery and business continuity using real-time replication and failover that can protect individual applications, entire servers or virtualized workloads running on VMware ESX or Microsoft Hyper-V.
- Workload Flexibility (Double-Take Flex): Easily manage any workload by booting it from iSCSI SANs, regardless of hardware.
I think Doubletake Flex is an interesting product. Bob said, “The idea is to make it easier to manage a workload to boot from network instead of local disks. Using the standard hardware you can boot to the iSCSI SAN. Blade servers are a good example. You may not have a lot of storage, and you can boot to an iSCSI LUN. We have a central console and assign MAC address to LUNs and it contacts to our management server to see where it needs to boot from and then it boots from the iSCSI SAN. ”
So, whenever you are faced with a ridiculous downtime window for your conversions, make sure to check out Doubletake’s solutions.
I’d like to thank Bob for taking his time to discuss the new Doubletake product suite.
What does it cost a Small Business to Implement Virtualization?
I get this question all of the time in one form or another, so I’m trying to determine hypervisor costs for a SMB as if I’m the owner looking to implement virtualization. This is an academic exercise, so pretend it’s your company and your money and you don’t have a particular vendor preference and you’re doing research online trying to determine apples to apples.
I usually don’t work the licensing side of the street, so I’m looking for feedback and correction if the costs are off the the mark. I’m using the vendor web sites and retail prices as if I were an SMB with no vendor connections.
Here’s the scenario:
From these requirements, we should have a really simple setup:
Two Hosts Connected to Shared Storage
Hyper-V
I went to the Microsoft Licensing assistance site to help me determine what I would need:
It said I need the Datacenter Edition because I was running more than 4 VMs per host.
Product Edition Advisor from Microsoft's Site
I worked my way through the tool and it recommended the Open Licensing with Software Assurance on the Server 2008 Datacenter version. The total was $8,094.
Not because the site really says so, but I think I need to add in the System Center with Virtual Machine Manager to be more on par with the other vendor’s management interfacesproducts.
I’m really not sure if I got all of the things included, but I bought Software Assurance with the Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, so I believe for Systems Center it will be $744 , plus I think I can use the Workgroup edition of Virtual Machine Manager for $505, plus I I think I’ll need CALs at $40 each of the 20 VMs for a total of $800. So for the management side of Hyper-V, I think the cost will be $2,049, plus whatever two more years will cost in maintenance.
I think I’ve met most of the requirements. Here is the link to the Hyper-V feature grid. But I couldn’t seem to select 3 years of support with their tools, so there will be more costs each year for maintenance. For one year I think the total is $10,143.
VMware ESX or ESXi
VMware has done a good job with packaging their products for small businesses. The Essentials Plus pack would be perfect at $4,905 except for some reason, it doesn’t include VMotion. So I guess we need to step up to the next level which is VMware vSphere 4 Advanced with 3 years platinum support for $3,675 each, for a total of $7,350 for the servers.
But wait, it’s only for 1 CPU, so I’ll need to contact someone to see how much a second one is to add to my order.
Only 1 CPU, I'll have to add another one.
To get VMotion and centralized management, I’ll need vCenter. They have vCenter Foundations for up to 3 hosts for $3,139 for a total of $10,489 for 3 years plus whatever a second physical CPU costs per physical host for the additional two years.
Citrix XenServer
Citrix has the technical product packaged pretty cleanly.
XenServer Enterprise has the technical features
XenServer with XenMotion is free, but I need High Availability and support for 3 years, so I need XenServer Advanced, Citrix Essentials Advanced with 1 year preferred support for $8,500.
I still need 2 more years of support
I still need 2 more years of support though. If it is linear, it should be $6,000 for 2 more years for a total of $14,500 to meet all of my requirements including 3 years of support.
Summary and To Do List
I don’t think I selected an unusual set of requirements in this as far as the hardware goes. I’ve seen plenty of dual CPU servers as the standard platform for virtualization projects. The 3 year support requirement didn’t seem to be out of line, but it seems to not be a frequent enough option for 2 of the 3 vendors to be in their online check out.
Microsoft – I need 2 more years of support costs. It wasn’t broken out where I could extrapolate it over 2 more years. I also would like for someone to validate that I have the right components and licenses for SCVMM.
VMware – I need to get the costs of adding the second socket CPU into the $7,530 server price
Citrix – I need to confirm that the support costs are $6,000 for two years
SQL server – I should note that both VMware vCenter and Microsoft’s Systems Center should be running with SQL server for production. Citrix XenServer does not require SQL server for XenCenter, so the cost of SQL Server can be deducted to the total for XenServer. For this exercise, I checked with CDW and SQL 2005 Standard was about $2,600.
It makes sense that the vendors would want to drive the larger organizations to partners to discuss pricing options. For the straightforward purchases like this scenario, it seems they might want to add just a few more options in their shopping carts for longer support warranties and more CPUs.