Last week was a whirlwind of activity for VMware and that’s especially true for those of us in the world of SMB. We’ve pulled together this post as a recap of the SMB related sessions, announcements, activities you might be interested in. What is your list of highlights from VMworld last week? Let us know what you heard, saw and learned in the comments section below.
SMB Spotlight – Solutions for Automating IT in the Small-to-Midsize Business
Russ Stockdale, Vice President and General Manager of VMware SMB Solutions, presented current and future solutions for helping manage and automate IT functions, setting up disaster recovery solutions, and ensuring business continuity.
“Virtualization is now mainstream amongst SMBs, with companies increasingly focused on finding the best ways to extend the benefits of virtualization to improve IT availability and protect their businesses with enhanced backup / recovery solutions. It is great to see so many SMB IT pros here at VMworld talking about how they are gaining a competitive advantage with their virtualization deployments.” Russ Stockdale
Read more of Russ Stockdale’s take on Extending the Benefits of Virtualization for SMBs
Russ also spoke with a few SMB’s innovators focused on finding the best ways to extend the benefits of virtualization to improve IT availability and protect their businesses with enhanced backup / recovery solutions.
Learn more about customers featured in the Spotlight and the obstacles they have overcome in their virtualization journeys.
- Seven Corners - Took 144 servers virtual and recently deployed their own virtual private cloud in 90 days. Watch the video.
- Myron Steves Case – Consolidated 72 servers down to eight within 90 days, cutting disaster recovery times and costs. Read the success story.
- MLB Network – Built out a highly reliable, agile and resilient IT environment in just a few weeks. MLB Network launched on January 1, 2009 in approximately 50 million homes as the largest network debut in cable history. And while MLB Network may be a global brand, it is also a classic midsize business with 450 fulltime employees, 14 IT staff and just two VMware specialists. Leveraging VMware vSphere, the MLB Network team built out a highly reliable, agile and resilient IT environment in just a matter of weeks. They started by virtualizing their business critical applications, allowing them to manage a single environment. From there the MLB Network IT team, began creating and virtualizing additional custom applications, creating a more dynamic on air-experience for viewers.
Announcements
New solutions for SMB IT Pros were announced. Learn more about these solutions:
- Introducing the New VMware Go Pro for SMBs
- Introducing the New VMware vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1 for SMBs
- VMware vSphere 5.1 Delivers New Features for SMBs
Journey to Your Cloud Makeover Contest
At VMworld, many SMBs submitted videos to win a $100,000 IT makeover for their company. You can submit your own entry anytime, anywhere at www.VMwareCloudContest.com.
VMware NOW
If you missed VMworld or would like to reminise you can view announcements and keynotes online at www.VMwareNOW.com.
Stay in touch with VMware SMB online
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VMware has some great offerings and we use many of them but it seems the SMB portions are offered more towards the “S” market than the “M” market. Although it also depends on how “M” is defined. We would love to use SRM and vSphere replication but for the prohibitive costs related to SAN array replication or data replication since we will have to pay for a big fat pipe. Any other alternatives to maintaining a SMB DR environment with VMware products other than going bankrupt?
You right to say that defining SMB remains tricky for everyone on the industry. I often found what is regarded as “small” in the US, is actually quite a large company in the UK. I guess as they say, everything is bigger in the US, even small-companies!
A couple of things about licensing. You might not have heard but vSphere Replication is going to bundled in with vSphere5.1 as part of the platform. It allows for simple failover/failback on a per-VM basis without the full SRM installation. Of course you won’t get the same automation that full-fat SRM brings, but it might be enough for your needs.
Remember too that you first 75-VMs are priced different, and this is intended to be geared towards folks with a modest number of VMs that they wish to protect. Although its not referred to as being an SMB SKU that’s the intention.
Of course you quite right to point out that you need a pipe to send your data changes. That’s a reality whether you chose to VMware to do the replication, storage array or some competitors product. Sadly, there’s no way round this fact. But there are couple of things to consider. Firstly, VR does support the “sneakernet” approach to replication. You can download your .VMDK’s to removable storage, ship that to the DR location and upload to storage. When you come to protect a VM with VR, if you point the destination to SAME location, what should happen is just a delta replication event – rather than a full-sync.
The other thing you might not be aware of is the amount of “churn” on your VMs in terms of data changes. You backup logs should give you an idea of this delta-data – alternatively if you snapshot a VM and look at the snapshot 0000.vmdk files size that can give you a guide line. At the end of the day you might find you N change through Y pipe force you to replicate a much less frequent rate than perhaps you had hoped. But I would argue a DR policy is better than none at all. I try to see DR as ‘insurance policy’. The premiums you pay are waste of money, until of course you need to make a claim. Any cost has to be balanced against the cost to the business should diaster happen, and you find yourself unable to recovery, or incurring substantial losses in the time it takes to recover…