Last week at VMworld we demonstrated our everRun VM Lockstep Option for Citrix XenServer 5. Despite the decrease in foot traffic on the show floor, the turnout was much higher than expected. High airline prices (or possibly just the Vegas night life :)) may have kept some people away, but we presume our high turnout was a result of the increase in innovative sessions and seminars.

For those of you who weren’t able to attend or were there but didn’t get an up-close look at our everRun VM Lockstep demo, Michael Keen (a.k.a. C1tr1xguru) shot this video of our CTO, Jerry Melnick, giving an in-depth demonstration of system-level fault tolerance for virtual environments. Thanks for stopping by Michael.

Our demonstration gave visitors an inside look at all three levels of availability:

1. XenServer HA: Level One: Failover High Availability standard with XenServer 5 Enterprise and Platinum Editions for failure detection and auto-restart and failover capabilities applications that cannot endure extended periods of downtime.

2. everRun VM: Level Two: Component-Level Fault Tolerance for business-critical applications, which require little or no downtime (such as ERP and CRM).

3. everRun VM Lockstep Option: Level Three: System-Level Fault Tolerance (available Q1 2009) for the most critical applications, which require zero downtime and zero data loss.

If you had a chance to attend the demonstration we would love to hear your feedback.

For those of you attending this year’s VMworld in Las Vegas, we will be demonstrating system-level fault tolerance for Citrix XenServer. This is what we refer to as level 3 on the availability dial.

If you’re interested please feel free to stop by our booth (#1047) to see it in action for yourself.

See you at the show!

When two servers (CPU, Memory, I/O) are joined and initialized to the same state during system start-up. Once joined, the two servers execute the same instructions and act identically; and are said to be lock-stepped. From the outside, the two systems look and behave like a single server. But the redundant hardware and execution environment provide all the needed resources to transparently handle a server or component failure.