Indeed you are correct about here in Blighty (I'm In London), but also over in the states as well.
From: James Rankin [mailto:kz2...@googlemail.com] Sent: 11 February 2009 14:45 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Vendor Question Sounds like I may have to have a look at this in future...however I am using shared storage here, so the level 2 won't work for me at the moment. I am almost ready to start putting together some sort of VDI infrastructure for evaluation in the next few months, so I might try and have a look at this in eval as well. I had heard of Marathon some years ago when I was looking at alternatives to clustering (before the VM revolution really started), but I hadn't thought to look them up again since, you seem to be right that they aren't marketed particularly well (at least not here in Blighty) 2009/2/11 Doige, Clayton <clayton.do...@cme-net.com> Sort of. The citrix version of VMotion is indeed powered by a cut down version of Marathon. I had a somewhat hard time figuring out what the benefit of a full version Marathon really was at first. So, Marathon call VMotion or in Citrix parlance Xen Motion, Level 1 protection. If a server failure occurs, the virtual machines will restart elsewhere. Level 2 is the current EverRun VM offering. With this offering you do not use shared storage. The storage is mirrored between the two physical boxes. In fact so is the Memory usage, and CPU I/O. With the system up and running, if you have a network card failure on one of the physical servers Network I/O fails over to the other physical machine and is carried across to the other server on management links between the two. Typically you see one ping packet dropped in this process, and this is due to the switch having to cope with the MAC address of the physical connection changing ports, not the software itself. So perhaps a drawback is that you have to invest in ample localised storage to accommodate your VM's, but what you get is a system that will give you server uptime you won't believe. In the event of a physical server failure, the VM does have to restart on the other physical server, however it is much quicker because there is a standby ghost copy of your running VM already waiting to come out of standby, so your 'boot' time is way less than a fresh VM boot as you would see in VMotion etc. The main advantage of this solution then is that you do not have a single point of failure in terms of a shared storage unit. In the next few weeks I am told that Marathon will have a level three protection offering which will see no server restart for failure at all. Pull the plug out of one of the servers and your virtual machine will just stay up and running. They already have a product called EverRun FT that offers this level of protection, but it needs three windows licenses and costs $16000 just for the Marathon software. The EverRun VM is less than half of that and includes your Citrix Xen Server licenses. In terms of management, it is done by a web page for the Marathon side of it, and the Citrix Xen Management Console can be installed on anything Windows XP and up, so you have no single point of failure for a management console as I understand is the case in an ESX environment? What's more (and this sounds scary, but isn't if you think about it) you can configure your storage on each physical machine as one big volume with no striping or mirroring for the local RAID controller to deal with. Marathon mirrors the storage, so you don't need to worry about local RAID protection, so you get better read/write speeds as an end result. I recently installed this solution for a client, and he pointed out the Marathon as a company struck him as a group of guys that got together and made an awesome product, and then forgot to sell it lol. From: James Rankin [mailto:kz2...@googlemail.com] Sent: 11 February 2009 14:17 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Vendor Question Is that just their version of VMotion? I run a virtual Citrix farm and obviously am very interested in anything that increases the reliance of my servers...but I already have Virtual Center, VMotion, HA and all the other bells and whistles that go with ut 2009/2/11 Doige, Clayton <clayton.do...@cme-net.com> Tell them to look at EverRun VM from Marathon. www.marathontechnologies.com awesome solution, sits on top of the citrix virtual server platform (Xen Server) so you can use it to protect multiple virtual servers for the cost of one server pair license (the license includes the cost of two copies of Xen Server Enterprise) so the bund comes in under £4K british plus the hardware, which just needs to be Hardware Virtualisation Assist enabled. From: gswe...@actsconsulting.net [mailto:gswe...@actsconsulting.net] Sent: 11 February 2009 13:51 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Vendor Question Does anyone have any experience with this company or their hardware. Medical client looking to move their servers to this. Recommended by the app vendor. http://www.stratus.com/products/ftserver/index.htm Thanks, just looking for feedback. Greg ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. ______________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________ This electronic mail message and any attached files contain information intended for the exclusive use of the person(s) to whom it is addressed and may contain information that is proprietary, privileged, confidential and/or exempt from disclosure under applicable law. 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