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.

Marathon’s team at VMworld got to sit in on the VMworld session Tuesday morning that covered VMware’s newly announced technology for fault tolerant VMs. While not bad for FT rookies, from what we saw, it’s a less than perfect solution for a lot companies that want to run business critical and mission critical applications in VMs. Let’s look at the four primary reasons why.

1. No component-level fault tolerance. The most common failures that result in unplanned downtime are component failures such as storage, NIC or controller failures. Yet VMware Fault Tolerance doesn’t do anything to protect against I/O, storage or network failures. By not addressing these primary sources of failures, VMware appears to be saying that you/the customer are on your own do figure out how to protect your storage and network connections. This may be okay for the very largest IT staffs in the world, but for the other 98%; it will not be sufficient.

2. Complexity on top of complexity. In order to use VMware Fault Tolerance, you’ll first have to install both VMware HA and DRS. No small feat in and of themselves. Then, because VMware FT requires NIC teaming, you’ll also have to manually install paired NICs. Then you’ll need to manually setup dual storage controllers (with the software to manage them) because it requires multi-pathing. And to top it all off, you’re required to use an expensive, and often complicated, SAN.

3. Limited CPU fault tolerance. With VMware FT, you’ll need to setup what VMware refers to as a “record/replay” capability on both a primary and secondary server. If something happens to the primary server, the record is stored on the SAN and then restarted on the secondary server. Two things to point out here. First, the whole thing depends on the quality of the SAN. Second, in the words of the VMware engineer who presented at VMworld, “this can take a couple of seconds.” So what happens to your application state in those couple of seconds?

4. For VMware virtual environments only. VMware FT will only work in VMware environments. It won’t work with other hypervisors, and most importantly, you can’t use for business critical and mission critical applications that you want to keep on physical server platforms (i.e., non-virtualized environments which still represent the vast majority of customer use cases). Oh well, only the vast majority of critical applications run in physical environments anyway.

It’s great to see VMware recognizing the need for fault tolerance, but we’re puzzled why they decided not to address the biggest source of failures – component failure. And we wonder how many mid-market companies will be able to justify the cost and complexity of getting VMware FT setup and keep it running.

If you had a chance to attend the session what were your thoughts?

VMworld 2008 is an essential event for any IT professional looking for the latest products and innovations in virtualization technology – and we are readily preparing to demonstrate what we’ve got.

As a result of increased adoption and further consolidation, the virtualization market has grown tremendously, increasing the spectrum of presenters and attendees alike. Based on this growth, I expect to see more value-add products, more new start-ups and technologies. In previous years, the attention has been on hypervisors. Now, I think the emphasis will be on tools and layered products that sit on top of the hypervisor, such as availability, management and monitoring tools.

Are you a VMworld Rookie? Here’s a tip – Past shows have left me feeling that a lot of vendors make grand claims regarding their products and services, but many are still very early in the development stage. Everyone uses similar buzzwords – business continuity, disaster recovery, high availability, management, etc. These are all fairly broad terms and vendors use some form or hybrid of each at their booths and in their presentations to lure you in to hear “the pitch.” Finding solution providers who have real customers, products, references, and established technology is a much more productive approach when attending the event.

When it comes down to it, a lot of past VMworld happenings involve the issue of hype vs. reality. The challenge for anyone who is going to walk the halls, talk to vendors, and attend sessions is the ability to validate what is reality vs. what is hype.

I’ll be attending several sessions at VMworld, but I am most eager to attend the session where VMware will announce their fault-tolerant technology. I think that will be a beneficial session to all event attendees. Our assumption at Marathon is that it will be something like a fault management or fault handling system –something on a similar level to what we do. But this is definitely an advantage for us – it helps to validate what we have been saying for 18 months. As the market leader in virtualization, VMware sees the same problem as Marathon – customers need and are requiring more protection for applications that get consolidated. Traditional failover environments aren’t sufficient for the higher value applications.

If you have any recommendations for VMworld sessions, please leave me a comment and let me know – I’m always open for suggestions. And if you have any questions or if you see me walking around, don’t hesitate to reach out - I’d love to connect with you.

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!

With VMworld 2008 rapidly approaching, we thought it would be fun to give our blog a small makeover to get everyone attending in the mood. The anticipation of this years’s event has already sparked a number of conversations in the VMworld community.

We are looking forward to meeting a bunch of our readers and people we read in person. If we haven’t already scheduled a meet up with you feel free to leave a comment and we will be sure to put you on our radar! For those that can’t attend and don’t want to miss out on the action, we will be providing live updates via Twitter (follow us).

We have a lot in store for the blog this month so be sure to check back.

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)

For those who might have missed it, Tarry Singh interviewed Citrix’s CTO, Simon Crosby at VMWorld Europe last month. Check out the video below and see what Simon and the Citrix team have in store for the future (Be advised the video is a bit long so get comfy and grab a drink ). You can also read Tarry’s remarks on his blog here.

For those of you who might have missed it the first-time around at VMworld , here’s your chance . We will be demonstrating fault tolerant virtual machines for a second-time with our counterpart XenSource at iForum 2007. Our technology showcase received the Best of VMworld Award for New Technology back in September, so we are eager to enlighten those who were unable to attend. If you’re going to be in the Las Vegas area from October 22 – October 25, we encourage you to stop on by our booth at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino for a demo.

On another note, XenSource’s own Simon Crosby will be at the Westin Times Square, in New York on Wednesday October 24, as a keynote speaker at the 2007 Ziff Davis Enterprise Virtualization Summit. If you’re in the area and want to learn more about the evolving virtualization industry swing by and tell Simon Marathon sent you

September has been a whirlwind of activity for the Virtualization and High Availability space…

• The success of VMworld (which saw attendance increase to 11,000 from 7,000 last year according to Allesandro Perilli at Virtualization.Info)
• AppCon 2007 to discuss the needs of mid-market IT Professionals responsible for assuring high availability and disaster recovery of business-critical applications
• And more importantly, the glamorous stuff that comes with a growing industry… Like TV Appearances (Gary Phillips on NECN) and Magazine Interviews (Steve Keilen in Processor Magazine)

It’s been a great month in terms of connecting with the best and brightest and discussing the future of the Industry. Every day we encounter news coverage and blog postings that provide an inside look into how the space is evolving and the opportunities that exist to improve the way we all do business.

For example, David Marshall’s post on VMblog discussing IDC’s report on the migration to next generation platforms in Asia/Pacific and Japan. As Virtualization grows in popularity and adoption levels increase, priorities will change based on the size of the organization, technological needs, and geographic region to name just a few.

We’re all continuing to learn what’s important and why when adopting Virtualization technology. That’s why these events, conversations and the activity this month are so important… it’s not just about the TV and Magazine coverage.

Following VMworld we have been getting a lot of positive feedback on our integration of fault tolerant technology with XenSource’s leading open source hypervisor. We would just like to thank all those who were able to stop by our booth including Damon Poeter who’s complete coverage of Marathon can be found here and Chris Wolf who yesterday posted on the Burton Group, Data Center Strategies blog, some valuable takeaways for all those who were unable to attend.

Thanks again!