Vizioncore: Backup and Control for VMWare ESX By Ann Ernst published: Tuesday, March 01 2005
Vizioncore creates software tools that ease the management of VMware, Citrix and Terminal Server systems. VSM spoke with Vizioncore President David Bieneman about their VMware products.
VSM: Tell us something about Vizioncore and your role.
DB: The company started in 2002 to develop applications that solve the biggest headaches resellers and administrators face when installing and maintaining VMware, Citrix and Terminal Services.
I develop strategic partnerships with Vendors and Resellers, set company direction, participate in application design and stay technically involved with our top customers. I'm a techie and I love this stuff. Of course I have my own ESX, Citrix Server and little SAN in my basement so I can play and stay technically sharp.
VSM: What led you to design a product for VMware? What need did you see in the market?
DB: We were helping clients virtualize their infrastructure in a small consulting engagement in northern Illinois. We maintain ESX servers and some Citrix for those clients, which gives us hands-on experience with the products. We took what we learned from our headaches like backing the virtual servers up, monitoring performance over time, and wrote a script to fix the problems onsite.
The customer liked that we fixed the problem, but when they wanted to dig their hands in and make a change, they’d have to call us, because the didn’t understand scripting. That wasn’t their primary knowledge base. They understood how to manage the box, but not the details of scripting.
We took what worked in the script and moved it to the development side of our business. When we see a problem over and over again, we have our development team turn those scripts into graphical applications that solve the problem. Then we don’t have to replicate ourselves thousands of times, and customers don’t have to call us in all the time for something they should be able to fix.
Our products have been designed by VMware consultants and system administrators. For VMware, these products solve problems like hot backup, change control, disaster recovery, end of life management and performance monitoring, and control for those that run Citrix or
Terminal Services on VMware.
We saw that when the resellers kept going in to make scripting fixes they were solving the problems, but then there were so many moving parts. Every ESX server has so many scripts and patches on them that if something breaks, you might not know where to look to fix it.
Our software took all the little scripts and fixes and turned them into a single piece of software that can be installed on the central console. Then the central graphical console is the administration point, and it can touch all the ESX servers and group all the operations. You can go to one spot to look, not have to figure out where the problem is.
The value proposition for VMware consultants, resellers and end users is our "been there, done that" onsite experience, which we bring to them through our software and our desire to constantly listen for recommendations on what they need to get the job done and satisfy their clients' requirements.
VSM: What does the product do?
DB: esxRanger performs hot backups of VMware ESX Servers, with error checking and logging, all from a Windows console. You can back up production servers in the middle of the day, take point in time backups prior to applying a service pack or application installation, send virtual machine .DSK files across T1 lines to remote locations for disaster recovery and archive servers for end of life management. There is a set of safety checks that separate it from any scripts out there.
esxRanger can also restore VMs to an ESX Server, commit VM guest .REDO logs from a Windows host, view VMFS partitions, VMFS free space and files in VMFS partitions, all from Windows. We have even been successful in dramatically reducing the CPU utilization on the ESX console operating system by integrating our code into a set of custom FPGA's to perform the compression.
esxRanger has an optional feature that can stop services on Windows guests just prior to kicking off the backup; we start them up seconds to minutes later so downtime is at a minimum. This
short down time ensures closed files in the guest OS. It is an option for administrators who want to ensure that a specific application’s files are closed prior to the backup.
VSM: What hardware platforms are supported?
DB: We support ESX Server on IBM, HP and Dell. In a few instances we have used our own custom designed hardware with success, as our own appliance can run ESX Server.
VSM: Does esxRanger integrate with VirtualCenter?
DB: We have a new version coming out that will integrate with VirtualCenter’s SDK to provide information to our product and to the user on the screen. The current version uses the default VM COM component of VMware ESX server, and it will continue to do so.
When we add VirtualCenter integration to our product, if something stops working on the VirtualCenter side – the database is down, or the server is down – our backups and performance monitoring still won’t fail. We’ll fall back to the VM COM communication method.
We’ll continue to support both. While customers might use our VirtualCenter integration, because it might be faster and might grab data more easily from each ESX server, they’ll always be able to fall back to the VM COM method. The product will still work even without VirtualCenter.
Today you could use esxRanger to copy a running VM and deploy it to another ESX Server. You would have to run a post operation like "sysprep" to give the machine a unique personality, but we could be the duplication tool in an ESX Server shop.
VSM: Can you talk about the product that does performance monitoring?
DB: Our vc-iMonitor product does performance monitoring and control. It was originally designed to help multiple users running on a Citrix server using multiple processes not clobber each other. If there is a problem with contention you can tell what’s happening down to the process and user level.
We have used that product to successfully run small organizations using Citrix and Terminal Services on VMware. If you wanted to try to put test platforms or small departments or silos of Citrix or Terminal Services on VMware today, you would have some definite performance issues and probably use it only for a testing platform. vc-iMonitor allows us to control the processes a little more granularly. If one process is taking the resources we can tone it down so the other users don’t feel a big hit. It’s like inside-the-operating-system process load balancing.
We’re adding special VMware counters into vc-iMonitor that aren’t available from VirtualCenter or from the management user interface. The counters are available from the Linux prompt, so you would have to go to the Linux prompt of each ESX server today to view these counters. And you’re only viewing them real-time, you don’t get any historical or line graphs.
If you’re looking at numbers and values and trying to make sense of them across 15 or 20 ESX servers, that’s a big job. Especially because now with KVM you only have one screen up in front of you at one time, you don’t have 15 or 20 monitors.
In vc-iMonitor we’ve integrated code that goes to each ESX server and pulls important VM kernel values back to the graphical Windows screen. It can show you in real time what’s happening across a broad range of servers, so you can get a feel right then of what your infrastructure is like and how the VM kernel is able to schedule the machines and resources.
VSM: Now that so many virtual machines are being deployed, the market is beginning to see the monitoring and management tools necessary for the data center. What was the timeline for your product development?
DB: vc-iMonitor came out in early 2004, and esxRanger came out in the third quarter of 2004. For esxRanger we’re working on the VirtualCenter version and a graphical user interface that any administrator or user can run to back up their virtual machines.
There is a video on our website that shows the graphical user interface right now. People can go to the website (www.vizioncore.com) and preview the Online Demo to get a feel for what the graphical version looks like without having to try beta code or install anything.
We will be releasing a free tool to view %READY and %USED values as well as other values from the ESX Server and the VM kernel that will be consolidated back to a central Windows console for real-time monitoring.
We also have developed an appliance that hosts esxRanger and connects to your SAN, and can backup your VMs by directly attaching to your LUNS. It has local hot swap storage so you can perform weekly backups, swap the drive out and send it offsite for DR purposes. It goes far above and beyond the capabilities of a PERL script.
The appliance has custom processors that offload the compression and file transfer from the ESX Servers. We recently took a 6GB disk down to 700MB. That’s a lot of storage savings. Even if you have a SAN, that storage is expensive, especially expanding it with switches and adapters.
VSM: Does it work with iSCSI storage?
DB: We can send to any destination, so it can be iSCSI, Fibre Channel or a Linux Windows host. Right now our appliance hooks up through Fibre Channel to a SAN, and can read those disk files and pull them back onto the appliance itself. You can pop the disk out while the machine is on, because we have a hot swap set of disks, put it into a static bag or a case and send it to a remote location. Then you put a new drive in and begin backing up to that disk. Every week you can rotate those offsite.
That could be adapted to hook up to an iSCSI SAN by swapping a board inside the appliance.
VSM: Do you have any plans to support VMware GSX Server or Microsoft Virtual Server?
DB: We may add support for GSX, but we’re still looking at how to leverage the SDK to provide similar functionality to what we do on ESX Server. These abilities are available in GSX in a way with a snapshot button. Right now we are focusing on ESX Server.
VSM: Do you have any competitors?
DB: Not right now. We are the first Windows based, intelligent backup solution for VMware ESX Server and we're very excited about that!
I’m sure some will come up, so it’s our job to keep the edge. We think we’ve done that with the appliance that’s coming out and with some of the guest operating system interaction that we can provide, like stopping and starting services in the Windows guest operating system prior to doing the backup.
You might consider the PERL scripts that you run and maintain on each ESX Server some competition. You can download and install them to each ESX server, but they comes with a very high maintenance overhead. You need people who understand Linux to be able to run those scripts, and you have to run them from each ESX server. They’re not graphical and there’s no error checking. It’s a whole different game.
If there was no esxRanger, or if someone wanted to spend zero dollars and knew Linux very well, and they had a small environment, then those scripts might work just fine. But for $124.50 a CPU we feel we have a much better alternative. It’s a low cost of entry and we’ve put the work into the error checking and support. If you have a problem, we’re available. If you have a request, we can put a modification in for you.
VSM: Who is your target audience?
DB: Anyone who has ESX Server, from small single host installations to many host and SAN attached installations. We have clients with two servers and clients with hundreds of servers. Even customers with SAN replication need to ensure that they have a backup prior to an upgrade. Our compressed images are much more manageable than SAN snapshots and can be easily backed up to tape or DVD media.
We have a couple of clients who use esxRanger to perform weekly and point in time backups for DR and change control on over 100 virtual machines. Some clients run these backups nightly. Some, like banks, large municipal organizations and medical centers, send the backups over T1 lines.
VSM: Do customers buy direct or through a channel?
DB: Instead of trying to build our consulting business, we’d rather maintain a small consulting effort that understands hands-on what the issues are with VMware, Citrix and Terminal Services. We take that knowledge, develop a product and move it through the reseller channel so the reseller has these tools. That elevates the reseller’s knowledge base so they can have junior engineers put out a high quality solution just like their senior engineers.
VSM: Can you give us any target dates for the appliance and the product upgrades?
DB: By the second quarter of 2005 we’ll have our GUI, our graphical user interface, available. By the third quarter of 2005 our appliance will be readily available. We do have prototypes now. If someone is interested in purchasing a prototype we have an early adopter pricing structure, where they can try the appliance now at a reduced rate and provide input into the product as a beta user. That’s been a very successful program. The customers help make the products for us.
We should have something for VirtualCenter integration by the third quarter of 2005 as well.
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To learn more about Vizioncore,esxRanger and vc-iMonitor, visit www.vizioncore.com.
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