Speed, Speed, Speed

Who would've ever thought you'd see network performance like this on an Windows box:

This is the networking graph I got off of a physical box running the inital push for Quest vConverter's Continuous Protection option. The blip in the middle was it switching from the C: volume to the D: volume. It just about knocked my socks off - I've never seen anything eat up the entire NIC on Windows.

I found out some really cool stuff with vConverter. With the Continuous Protection option, you can keep a full-image copy of your physical server on an NTFS Share, ESX(i) Server, or Hyper-V server. After the first push, it just copies block (or file level) changes (whichever option you want) to the target store. This way, if you ever lose your physical box, you can either immediately pop it online in your ESX/Hyper-V box, or do a V2P back to your original hardware once it's back up and running. Very cool stuff.

Even cooler - let's say you're looking at Offsite DR. You already have Virtual Servers (VMware or Microsoft) in a hardened data center, and are currently replicating your VMs at your main office offsite to there. Good for you! Now how do you push your physical boxes out there?

With vConverter, you can do your initial copy locally (say to an NTFS Share on a NAS device), then you can take it to your Datacenter, and upload it to your SAN that your ESX or Hyper-V boxes use. Then go into vConverter, do a "change target" and select your ESX or Hyper-V box, tell it where the data is, and your good to go. Now all you have to worry about getting across the WAN is your block changes. Now you really do have an Offsite DR solution.

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Dustin Shaw

VCP

vConverter 5.1 is out!

Yesterday Quest released vConverter 5.1 onto their website for download. You can check out the product here.

For those of you familiar with their product, you'll know that vConverter 4.2 was the previous version that was out. They recently released vConverter 5.0 as an "early release preview" (AKA - Beta), but it had numerous issues. One tech that I spoke with said that the marketing team put version 5 online for download and issued a press release before they consulted with tech or engineering - sounds like many marketing guys that I know.

If you were one of the lucky ones that installed the "early release preview," then you'll have to uninstall it before you install vConverter 5.1.

The new features to look for in version 5.1 are:

P2V for Linux Servers: this was a big absent in the previous releases. I know many penguin fans who are excited about this one. It's a Cold Convert, so you have to be down when doing the conversion and have physical access to the box so that you can boot off a CD or PXE server (unless of course you have ILO or DRAC or other console access). This is unfortunate since VMware's vCenter Converter 4.x supports several Linux builds doing Hot Convert, but there are a number of other features that vConvert does buy you.

ESXi Support: This is a good thing since VMware is pushing everyone hard away from ESX onto ESXi. They are doing this by using a Virtual Appliance.

Hidden Partitions Support: This has recently become an issue with Windows 7 and Server 2008r2, keeping most converter programs from being able to work. I'm glad to see this added, as if you've been reading my blog you know that I recently ran into an issue caused from someone doing a conversion of a 2008r2 box using Acronis.

vConverter 5.1 download comes with a 30 day trial license that allows you to use Continuous Protection on up to 5 source machines, and limits you to 5 conversions (not including the Continuous Protection conversions).

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Dustin Shaw
VCP