So you missed Citrix Synergy in San Francisco? It's not too late to register for the update seminar on Tuesday - May 25, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM.

Did you miss the latest Agile360 webinar on "Leverage Your Citrix XenApp Licenses to Add Virtual Desktop"? You can still catch the video presentation and learn about the promotion on our web-site at:

www.agile360.com

Entisys Solutions and Agile360 receive the "Citrix Western Region Partner of the Year for 2009" and Citrix State, Local Education and Healthcare Partner of the Year.

Learn more

Entisys Solutions and Agile360 receive the 2009 Arrow ECS "Highest Year-over-Year Growth - West" award for sales of NetApp®enterprise storage solution

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Entisys Solutions and Agile360 Achieve Microsoft Virtualization Competency status; Earn "Winning on Value" award from Microsoft

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VMware Site Recovery Manager 4.0.1 was released in Febuary

Improvements and fixes include the following:

• Test recovery times have been improved for ESX 4.0.1 hosts that use iSCSI arrays
• Customization is now supported for virtual machines running Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2
• Resolution of a problem that could causerecovery plan failures with hardware iSCSI HBAs connected to Clarriion arrays
• General bug fixes

Click here for the Readme.

HP Lefthand virtualizes local storage 

Does your company require enterprise level virtual environment features like high availability but can’t afford the required shared storage environment?  Find out how the HP Lefthand P4000 Virtual SAN Software (VSA) enables the benefits of a physical SAN with the ability to transform captive server disk drives and build a virtual iSCSI SAN.

Click here for more details.

Citrix Delivers the Citrix NetScaler VPX Virtual Appliance

Have you checked out the Citrix NetScaler virtual applicance, AKA Citrix NetScaler VPX , yet to provide High Availability and Site to Site Load Balancing of Web Applications and Remote Access? Customers are start to not only utilize this solution in their testing, and development environments, but they are also starting to leverage this solution for Disaster Recovery sites. 

Click here to download the Citrix NetScaler VPX Express Edition for Free (MyCitrix.com account required).

 

HP, Citrix, VMware or NetApp Training Needs? We have you covered.

Contact your Agile360 Account Executive concerning your training needs for HP, Citrix, VMware and NetApp solutions.

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Microsoft’s latest version of Exchange server, Exchange 2010, features many improvements in the area of mailbox resiliency and recovery ability.  One of the most important changes introduced is how high availability of mailboxes can now be configured.  

In the previous version of Exchange server, Exchange 2007, there were multiple options to incorporate high-availability for mailbox databases such as local continuous replication (LCR), standby continuous replication (SCR), cluster continuous replication (CCR) and single copy clusters (SCC).  Although these features were a great addition to the Exchange server solution, LCR and CCR meant that you must configure a mailbox server as a dedicated role which then requires the creation of additional Exchange servers to house the hub transport and client access roles.  For many smaller organizations that could normally house all three roles (mailbox, client access and hub transport) on a single server, the introduction of high availability often doubled the cost of the project. 

With the introduction of database availability groups in the Exchange 2010, high availability could now be incorporated into mailbox servers that also had the client access and hub transport roles installed.  Microsoft also simplified the process of implementing high-availability by automating the creation of the failover cluster and file share witness resource. 

For more information on the high availability improvements of Exchange 2010, click here or contact your Agile360 Account Representative to schedule a Technical Meeting with our  Principal/Solution Architects.

 When VMware released VMware High Availability (HA) in VMware ESX 3.0, it  increased virtual machine application availability by providing the automated restart of virtual machines following a failure of the underlying host server. However, applications would experience a short period of downtime during the restart process. With VMware’s release of Fault Tolerance (FT) in VMware vSphere 4.0, it provides the next level of availability with continuous application protection from host hardware failures. In combination with VMware vLockstep technology, FT provides zero downtime and zero data loss.

There are many caveats and design decisions that are required for you to implement FT. If you are thinking of implementing VMware FT, you will need to ensure your hardware (for example: an extra NIC or two) and the architecture (for example: VMs protected with FT currently can only use 1 vCPU) are up to specification. 

Do it right the first time by giving your Agile360 Account Representative a call to schedule a discussion with one of our Principal/Solution Architects.

For more information including VMware FT requirements, visithttp://www.vmware.com/products/fault-tolerance/

With the recent release of Netapp’s latest SnapManager product, SnapManager for Hyper-V, backups of Microsoft virtualization take less time than traditional virtual machine backups and reduce the amount of resources required by the host server. 

The typical virtual machine backup not only increases the CPU utilization of the host server, but also impacts the available band width I/O of the server.   Netapp’s Snapmanager for Hyper-V provides near instantaneous backups and fast restores of virtual machines.    SnapManager for Hyper-V also simplifies site based disaster recovery and offsite backups when integrated with other data protection offerings from Netapp such as Snapmirror for replication and Snapvault for remote backups.  Completed snapshots of virtual machines can instantaneously be replicated from a primary Netapp SAN to a secondary SAN to facilitate a site failover capability using Snapmirror or provide an offsite backup capability when integrated with Snapvault.  

To read more about SnapManager for Hyper-V, click here or contact your Agile360 Account Representative to schedule a technical meeting with our Principal/Solution Architects.

So you have been running a virtual infrastructure solution in your production environment for months or even years now (I remember when vMotion didn't exist in VMware ESX yet), but you Disaster Recovery (DR) plan doesn't take full advantage of virtualization. Maybe you don't even have a DR plan yet or haven't rolled out virtualization to a majority of your production infrastructure. 

Well the time is right for you to start looking at your virtual infrastructure and their DR solutions. Here is a short list of the DR solutions for the major virtual infrastructure solution (alphabetically):

• Citrix StorageLink Site Recovery for Hyper-V (included as part of Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V, Platinum Edition)
• Citrix StorageLink Site Recovery for XenServer (included as part of Citrix Essentials for XenServer, Platinum Edition)
• VMware Site Recovery Manager 4.0.1 for VMware vSphere(seperate product from the VMware vSphere and vCenter products)

Each of these solutions have the same basic concepts though they handle them differently and have different requirements.

The solutions will tie virtual infrastructure (virtual infrastructure host servers, network, and storage) in two different datacenters to provide a "Easy" button to failover your virtual machines. They rely on the underlying storage system of your virtual infrastructure to perform the replication of that data, but the site recovery solutions can automate many of the procedures you would take in a DR scenario. The solutions will also have a way to perform an isolated test of your DR plan so you can ensure your plan works.

Do you really want to make sure to stop replication on the storage, load up the configuration file, change the network or storage properties of the virtual machine to correspond to your DR site, power on the VM in the right order, then repeat 100s (or 1000s) of more times???   

These solutions can automate many of the tasks related to reviving a virtual infrastructure in another data center AND they give you aRecovery Plan that you can use with compliance officers or your management to show them you really do have a plan. The electronic and updatable Recovery Plan has more than justified the implementation of the solution in many organizations.

If you aren't looking at one of these solutions for your DR plan, you really should check them out and see how they may help your organization really have a DR plan that works, is verifiable and is documented.

To learn more about these solutions, contact your Agile360 Account Representative to schedule a technical meeting with our Principal/Solution Architects.  

Contact Us

For more information, sales and/or technical support, please contact your Agile360 Account Representative at sales@agile360.com.