Interviews

posted on 27 May 2008 13:53

B&F had a talk with replication vendor Neverfail about how its products integrated with VMware and other server virtualisation products. VMware has just introduced its Site Recovery Manager which would appear to compete with Neverfail's products. Andrew Barnes, Neverfail's senior VP for corporate development, was the man and the session is reproduced below.

Blocks and Files: How do Neverfail's replication products interact with VMware Virtual Infrastructure?
Andrew Barnes: Replication is a key component of Neverfail's Continuous Availability Suite. It works alongside Neverfail's Application Management and automated failover/switchback functionality to ensure physical and virtual deployments of critical applications are resilient and reliable and that planned and unplanned physical server and/or virtual machine outages will not result in end user disruption.

Neverfail offers the ability to embrace virtualization immediately without upfront investment in SAN 9storage area network) technology. Many customers use Neverfail to protect physical deployments of applications such as Exchange and BlackBerry Enterprise Server (as the primary server) with virtual machines as the secondary servers. As Neverfail delivers replication, this architecture works for local (HA - high availability) and remote (DR - disaster recovery) deployments without requiring SAN technology.

The benefit of this approach is immediate uptake of virtualization servers, and significant cost savings. A side benefit is that P2V (physical to virtual) migration is simple and painless because Neverfail maintains a complete and up-to-date copy of the critical application on the virtual platform. These benefits are particularly important for small and medium businesses that may be resource- and budget-constrained when trying to implement a complete Business Continuity solution entirely on VMware Virtual Infrastructure.

Where a full VMware Infrastructure solution is in place for High Availability, Neverfail complements VMware HA and VMotion by providing an application-level focus combined with remote disaster recovery.

A critical application in VMware Virtual Infrastructure is VMware VirtualCenter. This is a mission-critical application as it is the single point of control for VMotion, DRS, HA, SRM and VDI activity. It is also responsible for maintaining performance statistics. If VMware VirtualCenter (or it's SQL Server Database) suffers downtime, the management of the Virtual Infrastructure stops. Neverfail provides continuous availability of VMware VirtualCenter ensuring that the ability to manage is not impacted by planned or unplanned outages.

Blocks and Files: How do the products work with Storage Vmotion?

Andrew Barnes: Storage VMotion has a primary role as managing the location of VM disk images as part of Virtual Infrastructure housekeeping. The Neverfail software maintains a shared nothing architecture and as such does not depend on Storage VMotion.

Blocks and Files: How do they work with Distributed Resource Scheduler?

Andrew Barnes: DRS is part of the extended VMware Infrastructure Enterprise solution and as such relies on management by VMware VirtualCenter. If VirtualCenter suffers an outage, the DRS cannot fulfill its role within the Virtual Infrastructure. As mentioned above Neverfail for VirtualCenter ensures continuous availability of VirtualCenter and thus the full VMware Virtual Infrastructure.

Blocks and Files: How do they work with VMware's newly-announced Site Recovery Manager?

Andrew Barnes: The same answer as for DRS. SRM is part of the extended VMware Infrastructure Enterprise solution and again relies on management by VMware VirtualCenter. If VirtualCenter suffers an outage ... Neverfail for VirtualCenter ensures continuous availability of VirtualCenter (and thus SRM).

Blocks and Files: How does Neverfail technology work with Virtual Iron?

Andrew Barnes: As Neverfail works within the Windows environment it is possible that Virtual Iron users could take advantage of Neverfail. However, this has not been tested and certified

Blocks and Files: How does Neverfail technology work with Hyper-V?

Andrew Barnes: Neverfail is a Microsoft Gold Certified partner and committed to supporting current and future versions of relevant Microsoft technology. For some time we have been working on Hyper-V and as it moves towards a production release, Neverfail will officially support Hyper-V.

Blocks and Files: How does Neverfail technology work with Citrix Xen Server?

Andrew Barnes: Neverfail has tested our products on XenServer and we are a Citrix Technology Partner.

Comment: Neverfail appears perfectly suited to virtualized server environments from VMware and Citrix where there is no SAN, no networked external storage. It looks like to will fulfill the same role for Hyper-V but Virtual Iron users need to test out Neverfail first. Hopefully it will work.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}