♦ Direct to DVD
♦ Image mounting for modifying without restoring
♦ Image verification and validation
♦ Acronis Universal Restore
After an unplanned system crash, True Image Echo Enterprise Server allows administrators to perform a full system restore, a bare-metal restore, or a simple restore of individual files and folders in a matter of minutes from a centralized management console. Complete system restoration with the Acronis Universal Restore feature can be executed to an existing virtual machine, a new virtual machine, or even a physical box with different hardware. When troubleshooting a problem requires re-creating the issue on a physical server, True Image Echo Enterprise makes this an easy task.
Double-Take for VMware Infrastructure
Double-Take for VMware Infrastructure provides virtual machine protection by offering replication services for virtual machine files. The Double-Take for VMware Infrastructure product installs on a single Windows server in the network environment and allows multiple virtual machines to be protected from a centralized management console.
Double-Take for VMware Infrastructure sits comfortably in the realm of products dedicated to easing the disaster recovery and business continuity for organizations with a VMware virtual infrastructure. Double-Take for VMware Infrastructure captures changes at defined intervals, keeping the target virtual disk up to date and ready for failover, recovery, and backup at any time.
When a production server outage occurs, the replicated virtual machine can be started on the target server with the latest replicated data. The virtual machine will be consistent as of the last successful replication procedure. Replication is supported between any type of storage supported by the VMware ESX Server, including direct attached SCSI, fibre channel or iSCSI SANs, and NAS/NFS.
The concept of whole virtual machine protection resonates from the idea that a replica of the entire virtual machine is created, including operating system, applications, and all relevant patches, as part of the copy process. Like some of the other products in this category, Double-Take has the advantage of being an agentless utility that understands the VMware VMotion feature and provides a centralized interface for managing the backups and restores.
No "agent" software is required on the ESX Server, or within any protected VM, so protection scenarios are easily managed and rapidly deployed. Double-Take for VMware Infrastructure needs to be installed only once, and multiple protection scenarios can be launched. This approach aggregates resource consumption by VM protection so it can be easily monitored and managed at the VMware enterprise level.
Setting up a VM protection scenario is easy with a directed step-by-step workflow that guides the user through the process. With just a few mouse clicks, and in less than a minute, a VM protection scenario can be created and deployed.
The Double-Take for VMware Infrastructure management interface leverages the logical groupings and hierarchies available in VMware VirtualCenter. This makes it possible for an administrator to easily navigate through configured virtual machines to select them for management and protection by Double-Take for VMware Infrastructure.
Double-Take for VMware Infrastructure provides options for compressing the replicated files, providing flexible trade-offs between host system resource consumption and network bandwidth usage. This product provides flexibility to configure the frequency of change replication based on either the amount of change or the time that has elapsed since the last replication window.
Monitoring and Reporting
Several tools are available for monitoring and reporting a virtual infrastructure that provide great complements to the native tools in VI3. These tools work seamlessly to provide detailed data about hosts and virtual machines.
vCharter
vCharter, previously known as esxCharter, is a Windows-based application developed by Vizion-core Inc. vCharter is a data-collection engine installed on a central Windows server that connects to each ESX Server host on a user-defined interval to collect data about ESX Server hosts and virtual machines. vCharter is a comprehensive tool for monitoring real-time metrics regarding a VMware infrastructure deployment. It is capable of delivering both real-time and historical performance data. The vCharter user interface offers the performance view for an entire virtualized environment, including the ability to drill down for a more granular look at specific objects in the inventory, such as containers, hosts, or virtual machines. With all of the detailed capabilities and the “At a Glance” and “Top Five” views, vCharter provides either a deep or a shallow look at the performance of the virtual infrastructure.
Reports from vCharter can be constructed on-demand or can be delivered via e-mail on a scheduled basis. In addition to the e-mail functionality for sending custom reports, vCharter can be configured to send e-mails regarding performance thresholds.
Perhaps the most unique feature of vCharter is its ability to track resource costs associated with virtual machines in an effort to provide chargeback data. For hosting providers or IT departments that bill internal departments, the vCharter chargeback functionality provides an easy way to monitor virtual machine and host costs for accurate client billing.
Overall, vCharter takes an impressive step forward in comparison to the native monitoring tools found in the VI Client. With added functionality and enhanced detail, vCharter will provide all of the data administrators could need about the performance of their virtual infrastructure.
Veeam Monitor
Veeam Monitor is a Windows-centric utility focused on three aspects of the virtual infrastructure:
♦ Monitoring
♦ Alerting
♦ Capacity planning
Veeam Monitor is at its best in environments that include a VirtualCenter server that centrally manages the VI3 deployment. Smaller environments that do not use VirtualCenter can still use Veeam Monitor but will not experience the full functionality of the tool.
The Veeam Monitor monitoring process details the performance statistics of resource pools, clusters, or individual hosts and virtual machines. Administrators can get a high-level overview of virtual infrastructure performance, or they can dive into details to discover system bottlenecks that are causing performance issues.
All the data gathered from Veeam Monitor is consolidated into a SQL Server database, making it available for some of the other features in Veeam Monitor: trending and capacity planning. All of the historical data saved in the SQL Server database can be used to identify trends in resource utilization and plan for future growth.
The data-collection process of Veeam Monitor includes an alerting component that allows administrators to stay on top of performance at all times. Veeam Monitor also integrates with leading monitoring tools like CA Unicenter, IBM Tivoli, and HP OpenView.
When deployed correctly, Veeam Monitor arms administrators with a powerful tool for being proactive about system performance and bottleneck identification.