Every year Windows IT Pro magazine talks with hundreds of vendors, attends dozens of product demos and reviews some of the best products out in the Windows market. All the products the Windows IT Pro staff has identified can help IT professionals do their jobs faster and more efficiently. This year we are pleased to announce that everRun VM has been chosen as a bronze winner in the virtualization category. Here’s what our CEO Gary Philips had to say:

“Given all of the innovative virtualization companies considered for this award, we are honored to be named a Windows IT Pro Editors’ Best Award winner in the virtualization category. This award is the tenth industry award we have received in the past year, a testament to the importance and value of what we are doing to help companies reduce costs and ensure the availability of their applications.”

Other winners in our category include Parallels Virtuozzo Containers (gold winner) and VMware ThinApp (silver winner).

Casinos want a simple, affordable way to make sure their casino management and player tracking applications don’t suffer outages and the repercussions that follow. Because IT staff are usually not onsite at each casino location, casinos need software that doesn’t require manual intervention to restore operations after a failure. Over 90 casinos in the U.S. currently use everRun software to prevent outages and data loss in their Windows-based slot and casino management applications. Since the gaming industry is highly competitive, it is important to maintain customer loyalty by rewarding players with bonus points and prizes for playing. A failure on one of the servers running the management applications can knock out the entire rewards system for that location, resulting in inconvenience for hundreds of guests and potentially a negative impact on customer loyalty.

Looking for “Self Maintaining” Availability

IT executives at casinos we’ve worked with evaluated several options for protecting their casino management applications before selecting Marathon. The “cold standby” servers they had used in the past were only effective if the necessary IT staff was immediately available on the premises. Many also considered clustering, but the gaming applications they used often were not “cluster aware,” and wouldn’t operate effectively in clusters without a lot of app scripting. What they were looking for was “a sound technology to protect their applications capable of self maintenance.”

Selecting Automated High Availability and Redundant Servers

As one executive at a Casino that selected everRun put it, I have no IT staff onsite at most of our locations. What appealed to us so much about Marathon’s everRun was that if a server fails, everRun restarts correctly and recovers properly on its own. As another IT exec told us he was “impressed with the automated redundancy of everRun because it would help prevent outages due to administrative errors.”

Getting Reliable Protection for Casino Locations without Onsite IT

In the words of another Casino IT exec, “Over time we came to appreciate the “self-maintenance” aspects of the Marathon software …you install it and it just works as advertised with little to no IT intervention. With the Marathon systems, the slot system applications have operated continuously. The systems deliver 99.999% availability and full protection from failures.”

At the beginning of July I posted asking our readers to vote for us for Fast Company Magazine’s Fast 50 Reader Favorites. Apparently quite a few people listened because we placed #1 on the list! Being nominated was honorable enough, nevermind topping the chart.

The companies nominated are all major innovators of business technology including: BlogHer, Mozilla, our partner Citrix, FedEx, etc.; so you can imagine the look on our faces when we saw where we placed on the list.

We’ve worked hard to achieve this recognition and are glad that our services aren’t going unrecognized by the community. Thanks to everyone that voted and to the team here at Marathon for making this possible.

Now we’re going to Disney World!!! (just kidding…VMworld’s more like it)

“When we describe everRun VM to customers and prospects, the common reaction is ‘it’s too good to be true’” – Steve Keilen, VP of Marketing for Marathon Technologies

Today we made a Single Host Trial Edition of everRun VM available for prospects to download and test out. The trial edition allows users to experience everRun VM benefits – automated setup, configuration and management, intuitive interface and reliable VM protection – all within a matter of minutes.

By experiencing the simple “Click to Protect” power of everRun VM customers can:
• See how easy it is to protect a virtual machine in two minutes or less
• Put the protected VM through failure scenarios (including network and disk failures)
• Use online migration to move a running protected VM to another XenServer host

If you or your organization is in the market for fault-tolerant, high availability virtual server software, we encourage you to download the everRun VM Single Host Trial Edition. It comes with everything you need to get started, including an evaluation copy of XenServer Enterprise Edition. Feel free to leave a comment or contact us with any questions you may have.

With Microsoft’s Hyper-V announcement a few weeks back, the buzz around virtualization continues to rise. In this Network World podcast, our CTO Jerry Melnick discusses what Microsoft’s announcement means for the virtualization industry. Jerry believes that Microsoft’s moves will bring virtualization within reach of many companies who have been hesitant about adopting it before now – giving Microsoft the opportunity to swim in uncharted waters where VMware hasn’t been able to go.

The podcast also highlights Jerry’s take on the thriving virtualization industry and how the growing virtualization ecosystem is creating solutions that “fill in the blanks” e.g. everRun VM allows customers of all sizes to “consolidate with confidence” with reliable availability for virtual servers.

Do you think availability is a critical factor for a successful virtualization deployment?

Can virtualization move beyond test and developmental in most companies and become a key component of the core enterprise IT infrastructure? Jerry Melnick discusses the necessity of high availability in a virtual environment and how it can be achieved with Mike Vizard of eWeek.

If you’re interested in using virtualization for essential applications like Exchange but haven’t yet because you’re worried about keeping them available, we encourage you to listen to this podcast and learn about the proliferation of different virtual machines, why there are different types available, and how Marathon’s HA solution can make virtualization of applications like Exchange and SharePoint a reality.

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!

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.