DB: Sure. Our flagship backup product, esxRanger, is still a necessary component. It’s part of that one-two punch for backing-up virtual machines on VMware ESX Server. With esxRanger you backup, let’s say, once a week. You would then do a file level backup nightly in the Guest using the native agent-based technology. That really provides for ultimate recoverability.

For standard operating practices companies have a challenge in maintaining high availability of their servers. In the event of a failure, a company can restore the whole image of the Operating System immediately or that same day, by using a third-party agent-based solution such as Veritas, which is set up in the Guest. It comes with a certain amount of downtime in most cases. That works for many companies out there, but some require more real-time type disaster recovery and high availability solutions. In order to achieve this you some may decide to increase their esxRanger backups to once an hour, if possible. But that would be pretty expensive in terms of performance since you would need to send large VM’s across a wire on a rapid interval. Even with compression this can be expensive on performance and maintenance overhead, if you were to backup every half hour or even hourly.

To solve this, vizioncore has come up with esxReplicator, which is built on proven, core ESX Ranger functionality. esxReplicator allows small to mid sized companies to facilitate real-time replication without the need for expensive, Tier One level, LUN replication. Unlike the Tier One EMC type products, which require a SAN on each end, and provide hardware level LUN replication from Site A to Site B, esxReplicator replicates the entire VM between two ESX Servers. The EMC solution is great for companies, whom already have or can afford the relatively expensive mirroring solution at Site A and at Site B, but there are many mid-level companies that will never be able to attain replication affordably. esxReplicator is the perfect solution for companies of all sizes to replicate virtual machines at the host level. With Replicator you can say, “I want to replicate this specific VM from this host, on this VMFS to another host flavor of ESX Server.” Any kind of guest virtual machine on any hardware can be replicated as long as ESX Server supports it. This is a value for any size company that wishes to replicate their servers.

Medium-sized businesses can replicate most of their low and mid-tier machines and some of the high Tier Ones. Large companies can use esxReplicator for Tier Two and mid-level machines that they would like to replicate as one-offs instead of the whole LUN. So, esxReplicator in short, is real-time replication for ESX Server at the VM level and offers a relatively inexpensive option for replication of an entire operating system.

DB: That’s true. esxReplicator can replicate via the WAN or LAN. esxReplicator will compress the image before sending it over the LAN to the destination ESX Server. The machine on the destination is offline. If you really wanted to get creative, it would be pretty easy to detect a source failure and power on the offline VM at the remote destination. We do that regularly internally at vizioncore for our web server testing and today it is a thumb’s up. It’s working really well.

DB: And remember esxReplicator is outside the Guest. esxReplicator will replicate whatever VMware supports. If it’s Solaris, Linux or NOVELL and ESX Server supports it, so does vizioncore. It doesn’t matter what the platform is, as long as it runs on VMware, esxReplicator will be able to replicate it.

This is really different from some of the file level, “inside the guest” replication technologies, which are licensing the source and the destination. The problem today is those products are not replicating the entire Operating System; thus, you are really just replicating a data volume, at the file level. What esxReplicator does is take the whole VM, the configuration of the VM, (for example, your whole “C” drive) and replicate it over to the destination and then only send changes when they occur. Some large companies may want to standardize on EMC’s SRDF Replication on the physical host and on certain specific VMware LUNs. For those mid-tier machines that are equally important to them, rather than replicate that whole LUN, esxReplicator now gives them a cost effective alternative.

DB: esxReplicator is in ALPHA right now, and moving to BETA as we speak. We believe the 1.0 release in April is very real. We’ve been using it internally for three months.

DB: I would have to say no. The closest thing to esxRanger is a free script that you can run called VM Snap from VMware. There are many who believe that VCB (VMware Consolidated Backup) has things in it that esxRanger has, however, we know that to not be the case. We know that VCB is a file-level product, that’s really meant to offload traffic from the Guest for a file level backup.

On replication, our closest competitors are “in the guest” replication. NSI has “in the Guest” replication which has EMC support. But, that’s in the Guest replication, and it’s almost misleading to compare the two solutions. They serve two different architectures and though they may serve the same audience, these solutions work very differently and offer very different value propositions.

esxReplicator is replicating at the ESX Server Host Level. So, really our closest competitor is EMC SRDF, and that does whole LUNs, where we do specific VM’s. You are comparing a relatively expensive hardware-based solution to an extremely affordable software-based solution. vizioncore will eliminate the barrier to affordable real-time replication with esxReplicator and we are going to remain the leader in this space. It’s not for everybody, and there definitely are companies who will not accept this style of replication and who must have an EMC SRDF platform. We understand the gap in the market as we did with the need for backups of the entire VM.

Analysis of our growth proves our understanding of what companies are looking for. vizioncore went from a dozen to a thousand customers between January 2005 and today. So, in 12 months last year, we attained 700 new clients and today we are over 1,000. The other major achievement for vizioncore last year was going from a dozen licenses to over 12,000 licenses. This shows we are setting the standard for backups of the VM, and hope to do the same thing with esxReplicator in the replication space for VM’s.

DB: Yes. Another exciting offering we have at vizioncore is a Virtual Machine Performance Monitoring and Control Tool. It’s called esxCharter as was released late last year. In the first release, it is a real-time management tool providing real-time monitoring of very low-level values inside the VMware Platform. We just added a database to it in the latest revision, so you can actually go back and run historical reports on your Virtual Machines and the host and see how they are performing. vizioncore has a suite of products today for enhancing VMware ESX Servers: esxRanger provides high availability and disaster recovery, as a backup solution. esxReplicator gives you real-time replication and esxCharter provides performance monitoring and control for the ESX Server.