Citrix, Green Computing, XenServer, , , , , , , , ,

I’ve been contacted by this software vendor to try out their product and make a review, I’ve been interested because I’m always looking for new software, tools to bring to our customer’s offer and complete the option available to backup virtual infrastructures. I know PHD Virtual systems company and what they do but I never had a chance and time to check out their stuff.

In an upcoming blog I will try their Citrix XenDesktop monitoring solution and check what this product can bring to a XenDesktop infrastructure.

For this backup software I won’t be able to go very deep and test everything I would like because my lab is not that big and I don’t have access right now to a biggest environment but as soon as it’s possible I will deep dive into this backup solution. Few month ago I wrote a blog about backing up your VMs using OpenFiler and I will do the same kind of blog to check if using PHD Virtual Backup for Citrix XenServer is a good solution if you have XenServer platinum licenses or if you don’t.

FIrst let’s check what you got with different XenServer editions : (more…)

15 182

Stephane Thirion

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  • Eric

    Great blog post Stephane: I also have good experience with this products, its really amazing how good it is.

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  • Jeff Riechers

    We use this in our cloud environment and resell it to clients. This is by far the quickest and easiest backup system we have ever used. We backup the equivalent of terabytes of data nightly in just a few hours. The ISCSI restore option provides fast file recovery

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  • Jeremy Renton

    Have been running PHD for some time now and it is a quite nice product. In my eyes this is the ONLY way to backup a virtual environement. The “old” way of agents on every machine etc. is simply too much mangement in an organization that can not afford a dedicated backup administrator. One thing you have to realize however. Everytime you do a backup the entire VHD must be read through as it needs to check every single block to see if it has changed since last backup. So backup windows can become quite large if you have large disks in your environement. And also you need to be aware that PHD recommends no more than 2TB data going through any one VBA. This might mean one VBA dedicated to one VM if it has large amounts of data…

    I am REALLY looking forward to the time when XenServer can provide PHD with the option that VMWare does. VMWare actually marks all changed blocks so that PHD does not need to read the entire VHD, but only the blocks that have actually changed since the last backup. In my environment this could cut the backup window to a quarter of what it is currently. And that is VERY useful when you run a setup that is used by people from Australia, Asia, Europe and South America. Theoretically I only have about 2-3 hours of backup window. A window that i currently can not keep – so i have to throttle it over a much larger time frame.

    So Citrix – Please implement this neat feature in XenServer. It will heighten its value immensely when it comes to backup through the hypervisor.

  • Hi Jeremy,
    Thanks for your comment and your feedback, this is very interesting ! I hope Citrix XenServer people and PHD Virtual people will come around this blog and your comment, because you made the point clear !

    Stephane

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