Every year Fast Company magazine “highlights the most innovative companies worldwide that take business to new creative heights.” This year we are pleased to announce that Marathon is a nominee for the Fast 50 Reader Favorites. We are asking our readers to please take a moment and vote for us as an organization that is driving and demonstrating business innovation.

The voting is open until July 15th so be sure to cast your votes!

Following last week’s discussion, event attendees had additional questions that we didn’t get to answer even though we went ten minutes over. We wanted to continue the discussion here on our blog so we figured we would post the continuation of questions and answers for everyone to see. As we mentioned before, if you would like to view the presentation delivered last week by John Humphrey’s (IDC), Simon Crosby (Citrix) and Jerry Melnick (Marathon), download the presentation here.

Are there any performance limitations with everRun VM?

everRun VM supports any guest environment created by XenServer, including multi-CPU VM’s.

Effect of losing inter-server link?

As a best practice we recommend two Availability Links for redundancy. If one should be lost, we will continue to operate unaffected using the remaining one. If both are lost we will take action to prevent complete loss of the VM or SplitBrain.

How far apart can the two machines be – i.e. is there a propagation delay issue?

Host separation is a factor of network latency, which must be <10ms round trip. Current deployments have exceeded 100 miles.

In case of a disk failure, does everRun rebuild the disk from the good physical host to the bad one?

Correct. Recovery of storage is handled as a background task so as not to require downtime or otherwise impact the running VM and application.

When will level 3 of everRun VM be available?

Level-3, System-Level fault tolerance is scheduled for later this year.

What requirements are associated with the everRun Level 3 Protection? (Bandwidth, latency, etc.)

Network and configuration requirements are the same for level-2 and level-3 protection.

Is StorServer a similar or competitive product to everRun?

StorServer is a backup appliance, not a fault-tolerant availability solution, and addresses very different requirements. It would be more complimentary then competitive.

What virtual machines (VMware, Parallel, etc) are supported by Marathon?

Currently only Citrix XenServer, however future plans are to expand upon this.

Are there certain applications that are not suited for everRun, such as I/O or compute intensive apps? Home does DR configurations affect performance?

This is very dependent on the configuration of the server, the VM, the storage and all other components. Appropriate best practices should be followed to ensure optimal performance for all applications.

Can Marathon support physical to vm HA? Does Marathon’s product fully support FC/iSCSI SAN shared storage between protected physical and/or vm pairs? Does Marathon product support local site HA server pair with a third node at a remote site in the event of site failure? Does Marathon product have latency limitations?

Marathon offers solutions for physical and virtual servers. These solutions utilize the same proven fault tolerant technologies however are independent of each other. everRun VM supports any type of storage that is supported by XenServer. Fault tolerance is configured using two VM’s. However we will soon be releasing an asynchronous solution that will allow a third replicated system at a local or remote site. Because everRun VM is a synchronous solution there is a latency requirement of 10ms round-trip between hosts. Our asynchronous solution will not have any latency requirements.

What is the pricing of everRun VM?

everRun VM lists at $4500 when bundled with XenServer Enterprise, and $2000 if you already have XenServer.

Thanks for all of your interest and questions.

There was a great turn out for the joint Citrix and Marathon Webinar today, The “Best of VMWorld Approach” to Virtualization and Availability. Thanks to everyone for attending. If you missed it or want more information visit here to download the presentation.

There were a lot of great questions for Simon Crosby and Jerry Melnick, which we have captured below. If anyone has any additional questions, feel free to leave a comment here on the blog or contact us directly.

Simon: Do you need 64-bit hardware to try out the express edition?

All modern server hardware is 64 bit enabled. Xen uses all of the modern features of Intel VT or ANDV to perform hardware virtualization of Windows; so the answer is yes but if you have a modern server you’re in good shape.

Jerry: How does everRun VM’s second level of availability differ from VMware HA?

One of the key pieces is that we compute through the failures of any I/O fault or failure, and then automatically redirect I/O to the device that survives it. In VMware HA, the failure of an I/O device isn’t necessarily detected or managed it’s just host failure. We are managing virtual machine failures in related I/O devices.

The second piece is that we’re doing active validation of all the devices so that we know at all times if all the resources are available and that they can actually be utilized in the case of recovery. If you don’t have active validation, such as with VMware HA, you can failover your VM and get to the other side but you may find that the device which handles the disk isn’t actually operational because of either a failure in the hardware or some kind of problem administratively with how you configured it.

Simon: Is there an extra cost associated with XenCenter?

No, it’s just a pre-feature of the product. Our architecture does not require something like virtual center because every server in the resource pool redundantly has every piece of information for the entire resource pool. Should any server fail, we automatically elect a pool leader from the remaining servers and all mainstream information is highly available as a result.

XenCenter itself is a perfect thin client UI which interfaces with as many resource pools as you want to run, but it is literally a thin UI – it’s stateless, and all of the state related to managing the infrastructure is in the infrastructure itself, which allows us to really scale this architecture.

Jerry: In the demonstration you gave, are users hitting both hosts in the exchange application being protected?

In the level 3 fault tolerance configuration we are running both hosts redundantly which is what you need to do for full system-level fault tolerance. In level 2 the amount of resource being utilized is less because you’re actually only running a virtual machine on one of the hosts, but you’re running I/O on both of the hosts. In level one you’re running at the next level down, with only a single VM allocated and no preallocation of the secondary side, with all I/O processing on just that one side. There is no active redundancy. That’s why we provide the different levels; so that you can choose which virtual machines really need to use that resource and have that ability, and which ones you want to make some trade-offs of availability versus resource utilization.

Simon: What does it mean to have a 64-bit hypervisor and why is that better?

If you have a 64-bit hypervisor then you can host both 32 and 64-bit guests and you don’t have any issues really to address space conversion problems. It’s a cleaner architecture, the memory architecture scales massively up to four terabytes (not that you can buy a server that has four terabytes of thin slots), but it allows us to massively scale the memory and CPU of the system. We support up to 32 physical CPUs and a box as a result, and we have an architecture that is going to scale superbly for us.

Jerry: Do you need a dedicated LAN to run everRun VM?

The only dedicated LAN we use, and can actually be shared because of the flexibility of XenServer itself, is what we call the availability link which is part of our best practices. Otherwise it’s all a standard LAN configuration that you would have in the XenServer pool.

Jerry: Are there certain applications that are not suited for everRun?

Our technology is completely transparent – relative to the application itself. Any windows application that you run on a Windows VM can be run by our technology.

Jerry: Is it possible to combine XenMotion with everRun VM?

As part of our capability, the ability of motion of VM from one host to the next is extremely integral to it. You get the capabilities to provide recovery from failures as well as to be able to have planned downtime and migrate your VMs when you want to do a repair. It’s an integral part of the product and we use XenMotion as the backbone of it. One difference with everRun VM is that we allow this motion capability without the need for a shared-LUN, or SAN, storage subsystem.

Simon: How would a current ESX 3.x customer migrate to a Xen environment and why should they do that?

There are free tools available to do this which can be downloaded off our forums and indeed Microsoft has similar free tools available. Here’s why you would do it: we guarantee that Citrix XenServer VMs are literally compatible with Microsoft Hyper-V. They’re also compatible with every other Xen implementation. What I see emerging is essentially two camps: A camp in which there is an open architecture (Microsoft storage architecture is very similar to XenServer, it’s also an open architecture) where you’ll have a bunch of virtual infrastructures out there from different vendors all of which are interoperable; and then a camp where there’s VMware.

The reason to move to XenServer is that we are fundamentally focused on a rich ecosystem of value added providers. We are diametrically opposed to an architecture which presumes that everything comes from one vendor, and where the entire architecture is dictated to you. The moment you invest in an architecture which is one size fits all (cost aside) you will find that it has limitations.

I am starting to see that the one size fits all architecture, which has done VMware a great favor for its first 10-15% of the market, is starting to show signs of age as we look at new use cases. For example, for desktop virtualization or for high availability, you can’t do this with that architecture and its no surprise then that at VMWorld the awards for innovation go to open architecture and best of breed vendors – Marathon at VMWorld winning the award for fault tolerance. We are dedicated to an open architecture and best of breed.

Jerry: Is Marathon planning to protect Linux based VMs in the near future?

Our road map will extend over the next year to protect all the hosts that are supported by XenServer.

Simon: Can you give a rough idea of the performance overhead of a virtual server vs. a real server?

It’s highly dependent on the workload. Typically we see between .5% and 2% overhead even for very I/O intensive workloads. For Windows it’s notionally higher. The great thing about this is that we are writing the hardware code; unlike my friends at VMware who are still tied to software implementation of virtualization in which they have to patch the binary of a running guest operating system. We ride the hardware improvement curve of Intel and AMD. What we’ve seen there is roughly a three-fold performance increase per year. Typical overheard for virtualizing Windows guests is around 3-5%. The most intensive workload I have ever seen is in fact Windows Terminal Services or our own Citrix Presentation Server where we currently stand at about 8% overhead.

Jerry: Does everRun VM support shared storage?

Yes. We actually support any capability in storage. Whatever kind of LUN that you can present to XenServer and carve up into a storage repository or a VHD, we will support that. If it’s a local disk, low-end RAID storage or just a bunch of disks we will support that, as well as high-end SAN storage. The advantage of the product is that we will support local storage for very low-end small environments.

Jerry: How far can the servers be separated?

It is not a matter of actual distance but rather a matter of network connectivity between the two hosts. We have systems currently deployed with separation of greater than 100 miles.

Yesterday our partner, Fort Lauderdale based Citrix, announced that they would be expanding its team to the Boston area where they would set up shop for their virtualization business with new offices in Bedford, MA. The virtualization business continues to grow steadily as companies seek ways to minimize power costs and mitigate risk; so being centralized in a tech-savvy labor market is beneficial to Citrix’ success. This expansion is expected to bring 250 workers into the space in the next 12 – 18 months.

We are looking forward to Citrix’ expansion and are eager to continue to work with our partner, who’s now right around the corner. Congrats!

David Maldonado was the lucky winner of the 8GB iPod Touch for his input into: What hurdles does/did your organization need to overcome in order to deploy a virtual environment.

We appreciate the input from all those who participated and remember the conversation doesn’t have to end….any additional feedback is always
welcome!

We’re constantly getting questions regarding the what, when, where, why, and how Marathon can help CIOs expand the use of virtualization and availability in their IT infrastructures. Jack Germain of LinuxInsider chatted with Marathon’s CTO Jerry Melnick recently and asked him some of these same questions, which we have excerpted:

LinuxInsider: Numerous industry reports show that the rush to adopt server virtualization is run mostly by very large corporations with a large bank of servers. What part of the market is your company targeting? Are you following the big money trail?

Jerry Melnick: Our product is designed to work like a standard application taken off the shelf and installed right out of the box. Existing availability systems can cause more problems than they solve. Our system is different. That is precisely what midsized companies need.

LI: What barriers does everRun VM take down that you expect to drive a company’s need for what you offer?

Melnick: For one, there is a cost advantage over high-end proprietary products. On the other end, data replication solutions don’t provide all the functions needed. Replication is managing data only. The comprehensiveness of our solution is what makes it unique. The application is unchanged in our environment. In addition, our solution does not need lots of setup.

LI: What are you thinking about beyond the accomplishments of everRun VM as the next virtualization enhancement?

Melnick: Now we have taken the process to the next leap. What I mean is we can now take two servers with hardware virtualized and build a Xen server pool and manage it as a single entity. We can build a virtual machine in Windows by installing out software and give it an interface of all running servers. Our next vision is to have one mechanism to do availability with multiple uses. It will take six months to one year. This will add new levels of choices to select plug-ins for desired results. All of this will be possible through one product.

LI: How do you see this vision changing the industry?

Melnick: We’re breaking through limitations. We are in a position to expand use. Availability is something that everybody is talking about. We are providing ways of doing it.

For Germain’s complete article visit here.

Last week Marathon was recognized in IT Administrator, one of the leading IT publications in Germany. If you haven’t brushed up on your German lately, here are a few highlights from the article which discuss the need for virtualization and high availability in Germany:

• More and more companies are realizing that it’s high availability and virtualization they need
• Application and data availability is also becoming more important for mid-market companies
• From a plethora of solutions that are on the market companies must choose the one that is right for them
• The right level of high availability might not necessarily be part of a solution, so it is essential that companies research their options
• The ability of virtualization solutions to bring down costs and cut down maintenance is immense

The full article (in German) can be found here.

A research report by IDC’s virtualization guru, John Humphreys, The Future of Virtualization: Leveraging Mobility to Move Beyond Consolidation highlights the fact that the automatic restart used by most high availability solutions for virtualization fails to deliver what most customers really want and need. Here is what John has to say:

“To address unplanned downtime today virtualization companies are providing an automatic restart capability if the hypervisor or host go down for whatever reason. While this is a good start to trying to combat the lost revenue associated with unplanned outages, ultimately knowing what is happening at the hypervisor and hardware layers fails to deliver customers what they most want — application-level awareness and action. In this way, current HA solutions in the virtualization market are “blind from the waist up.” That is, they do not know what is happening inside the virtual machine. They do not know if the operating system or application has stopped working, and that is ultimately what IT professionals charged with delivering application services most care to know.”

If you would like to learn more about high availability for virtualization, how to get application-level awareness and what that can buy you, we encourage you to join the webinar Thursday, June 26 at 11:30 EST. with John Humphreys (IDC), Simon Crosby (Citrix) and Jerry Melnick (Marathon).

For more information or to register visit here.

The folks at eWEEK have been giving Marathon a lot of love lately. On Monday they announced the winners of the eWEEK Excellence Awards and named us the winner in the infrastructure software category for everRun VM and had this to say:

“If infrastructure is the heart of the network, then infrastructure software is the brains. Marathon software helps to make these brains that much smarter with everRun VM, a product with the potential to solve many of the problems found in today’s complex networks. everRun VM combines server virtualization with high availability, leveraging Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition. With everRun VM, enterprises now have a fault-tolerant virtual-server solution that can provide continuous access to network services and reduce operating costs, yet is designed to be easy to implement and manage.”

In addition, the voting for eWEEK’s Best in Show wrapped up yesterday, and we weren’t the top winner, however we were in the running for second place as of late last night. Winner or not, it’s an honor to be recognized among so many top level companies that all produce products that can be considered as having the greatest impact on business moving forward.

Congrats to all nominees and winners!

Brian Ducharme from Virtual Strategy Magazine interviewed Simon Crosby at Citrix Synergy and got some great insights from him into the virtualization products at Citrix, their work with XenDesktop and XenServer, and how they work with partners (like us haha). Click on the video below to watch for yourself!

See additional insights from Synergy by David Marshall found here.