One of the pillars of virtualization is the ability to abstract servers from hardware to provide additional availability. Of course, infrastructure demands continue to increase and we seek to deliver high availability or even fault tolerance beyond the basic virtual machine. A number of solutions are available for virtual workloads.

The fault-tolerant space has three mainstream players: the VMware Fault Tolerance virtual machine feature with vSphere, Neverfail (which has an OEM relationship for VMware’s vCenter Server Heartbeat feature) and Marathon Technologies. Neverfail aligns with VMware, and Marathon aligns with Citrix.

Since the middle of the last decade, Marathon Technologies has offered solutions from HA to FT for Windows workloads before virtualized servers were mainstream in the datacenter. Back when I worked in the supply chain software industry, I used the everRun HA solution to replace fault-tolerant hardware solutions such as the NEC Express5800/ft or Stratus ftServer. Even back then, Marathon allowed customers to utilize commodity hardware for these HA and FT solutions.

Marathon recently released everRun MX, which provides a flexible offering to deliver FT workloads on commodity hardware. everRun MX can work for those who want to deploy a robust solution for a few workloads without a huge investment. everRun MX can use direct-attached storage or shared storage, making it price competitive if a traditional SAN is not involved. I’ve always thought it is very tough to provide a robust, highly available virtualized environment from small footprints such as a remote office.

With everRun MX, a base configuration starts at $10,000 and allows administrators to run a pair of servers of any configuration (core/sockets/memory) and includes one year of support and maintenance. The servers must have Intel processors. You can run everRun MX on dissimilar hardware, but they should be comparable. everRun MX uses the term Metal Pool, which would loosely equate to a cluster of virtual machines running with FT capabilities.

Figure 1. everRun MX allows a collection of virtual machines to function in a fault tolerant mode on commodity hardware. (Click image to view larger version.)

You might be asking: How well would this type of configuration be received within the greater software landscape? As virtualization customers, we go through this battle with new software titles to see if the software vendor supports their product being run on a virtual machine. For an architecture like this, it’s not as widely embraced as is a VMware virtual machine as a supported platform. But Marathon does offer 24×7 worldwide support in addition to an extensive partner ecosystem. I haven’t used Marathon products in a while, but everRun MX seems to bring more to the table for the customer seeking value and features.

citrix, everRun MX, ftserver, high availability, marathon, xenserver

Littleton, Mass.— February 16, 2010 – Marathon Technologies, the award-winning provider of fault-tolerant, high availability software for Windows applications, today announces that the City of Bonn, Germany has chosen Marathon’s everRun® VM. The software will protect their Microsoft® Exchange 2007 System and RIM Blackberry Enterprise Server 4.0, to minimize downtime for around 5,000 employees and ensure all systems are synchronized in real time.

The City of Bonn has been virtualizing its Microsoft Exchange 2003 system on a VMware ESX 3.5-Cluster for some time, providing access to 4,500 email accounts and 2,500 public folders. In August 2009 the Exchange 2003 System was already overloaded due to the number of users and the limited availability of Exchange databases. Additionally, the City of Bonn was bound to use Outlook 2003 after a planned migration to Exchange 2007 because of regulations. Unfortunately, Outlook 2003 is unable to automatically recognize a new Exchange Server following a failover of the server, meaning that a manual intervention is required on each Outlook client. The auto discover option that comes with Outlook 2007 means that busy IT administrators no longer need to do this.
Virtualization of the Exchange Server with Marathon everRun VM, on Citrix XenServerTM, achieves the following for the City of Bonn:

·         No manual intervention for individual clients – the host name remains the same
·         No double-licensing of Exchange – only one virtual instance and not two parallel systems exist
·         All systems are synchronized – without any time delay
The Citrix XenServer is noticeably better equipped to handle the number of users (designed for 4,500 heavy users / 32GB Ram, 4CPUs, and 9DBs), than the previous Exchange 2003 VMware environment (3GB Ram, 4CPUs, 4DBs). This has greatly improved the user experience when it comes to activities such as searching and sorting within Outlook.
Frank Bücher, divisional head of central services / IT systems at the City of Bonn, said: “We chose Marathon Technologies everRun VM for its price-performance ratio and the ability to automate and protect our Exchange 2003 system in case of a failure. This new technology also enables us to make our Blackberry Enterprise Server available on the same system, making mobile communication possible for more than 300 users, and allows for monitoring of traffic to track traffic offences.”
Daniel Pogoda, senior consultant at centracon GmbH, said: “It’s especially important for the public sector to identify effective solutions to ensure high availability and performance. The choice of everRun VM for the City of Bonn is perfect, as it provides automated availability, the flexibility to assign the level of availability for each individual virtual machine and in case of a failure no manual intervention is necessary. Any mission critical application should be protected by an everRun system, so that companies are able to focus on their core competencies. Additionally the customer achieves a post-implementation-agility by virtualizing the workloads.”
About Marathon Technologies
With more than 2500 global customers, Marathon is the world’s first provider of fault-tolerant, automated, high availability and disaster recovery software for physical and virtual servers.  Marathon everRun® software prevents outages and data loss – without IT intervention or specialized IT skills. Organizations using everRun achieve continuous availability, 100% data protection, and rapid disaster recovery – all through automated “click-to-protect” operation. In the past two years, the company has been recognized with sixteen major industry awards including Best of VMworld 2007 – New Technology, SearchServerVirtualization 2008 Products of the Year, CIO.com “10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch in 2009.” The company was also recognized as a 2008 Computerworld Honors Program Laureate, a winner in eWEEK’s Eighth Annual Excellence Awards Program and finalist for 2009 Citrix Ready Solution of the Year. For more information visit www.marathontechnologies.com

About Bonn: http://www.bonn.de/
About centracon GmbH:
The core competence of centracon GmbH lies in designing flexible and cost efficient solutions for delivering and managing IT-workspaces and applications. The range of our consulting services ranges from optimising and standardising IT-workspace-infrastructures, implementing innovative technologies for application virtualisation or virtual desktops, process and infrastructure automation to innovative business solutions for user self service concepts.

Citrix® and Citrix XenServer™ are trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one or more of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.

citrix, city, everrun, german, marathon