While much of the press around VMware’s launch of vSphere 5 focused in the area of cloud computing, the bar has been raised considerably in the scalability of vSphere 5 over vSphere 4. With vSphere 5, your VM’s can have up to 32 vCPUs vs. 8, 1TB of memory versus 256 GB, and an incredible 1,000,000 IOPS (I/O’s per second) vs. 300,000. And on top of this, creating VM’s has never been easier with vCloud Director 1.5 provisioning services and Stateless ESXi. If you thought VM sprawl was a problem in the past, get ready for VM sprawl² . More VMs = more data, more VMs = more redundant data, more VMs = longer backup windows, more VMs = more storage required for backups, and lastly, more VMs = increased complexity.
Quest vRanger 5.2, available this month, was designed with vSphere 5 / ESXi in mind. We’ve built upon our scalable architecture that allows for 20 concurrent VM backups in a single job in both Fibre and LAN environments. For ESXi LAN backups, we now scale to ESXi’s HOTADD limit of 59 streaming VMDKs per backup job. We’ve also introduced with vRanger 5.2 an appliance approach for replication in ESXi that allows for multiple VMs on a host to be replicated through a single Virtual Appliance (VA). As with vSphere 5’s new storage appliance, the VA approach represents the future of elastic, easy-to-manage backup and replication for 1 to 100’s of VMs per ESXi host.
Here at Quest, vSphere 5 isn’t exactly new. We have been testing and developing vRanger with the vSphere 5 beta since November 2010. We are now in the final stages of certification with the RTM version of vSphere 5 in preparation for the GA at VMworld. Supporting vSphere 5 day from one, and building upon our industry leading scalability and new replication VA, demonstrates Quest’s commitment to uphold our position as not only the market leader in VMware backup, but the technology leader as well.
Looking ahead, the near-term future for vRanger includes the ability to managing multiple vRanger servers from a single console,realde-dupe to shrink the footprint of VM image backups by 20:1, VA-based backup and even support for the backup of physical servers. vRanger is the product of choice for many of the largest VMware installations in the world, protecting environments with 1000’s of VMs, yet can be easily implemented at the smallest SMB.
