StorageCraft SPX 6.3 – introducing ESXi VirtualBoot
Author: StorageCraftAPAC
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With the introduction of VirtualBoot for vSphere, our partners and end users now have greater flexibility to use StorageCraft VirtualBoot technology with their choice of hypervisor: VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, or Oracle VirtualBox. Last year at VMworld 2015 US, VMware announced StorageCraft as a partner in their vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering (VAIO) Program. In joint collaboration and participation with VMware through the VAIO program, StorageCraft developed a patented technology called StorageCraft VirtualBoot for vSphere that enables direct and instant virtualization of our backup images as guest VMs directly on the VMware ESXi hypervisor. It is the first technology of its kind and is certified as VMware Ready– Application Software. VirtualBoot for vSphere can be used for testing changes to production systems offline, system recovery, and system migration (P2V, V2V) with minimal downtime. It allows users to leverage their existing VMware investments to maximize ROI. A key differentiator of our VirtualBoot for vSphere technology is that we access backup images directly from the source rather than through an intermediary appliance or secondary conversion process. Many competitors use a secondary system to act as an NFS mount point and then service the data from backup sets through a secondary location. At a minimum, that requires two connection points to access the data and is not as efficient or reliable when more dependencies are introduced into the process. With VirtualBoot for vSphere, access to the data is only a single hop away. We replicate the backup images directly to the virtual disk rather than routing each through a secondary process. This significantly improves performance and reliability, reduces latency, lowers system resource utilization, and decreases the overall total cost of ownership. With VirtualBoot for vSphere partners and end users also have the option to make the transition to the hypervisor permanent. VirtualBoot for vSphere lets you optionally backfill the data from the image set into the virtual hard drive and migrate from any physical device or virtual machine on any source hypervisor to ESXi. The data from the backup image can be fully migrated, transparently, to the native .VMDK file even while the VM is in use. Once this full-to-native migration is complete, the VM can operate independent of the backup image files. Applying a spare tire analogy, the VirtualBoot for vSphere process lets you change to a spare tire, and then get back to a full permanent tire while you are driving down the road. Once more, this technology is protected by patent and is a unique differentiator for StorageCraft. The powerful capabilities in VirtualBoot for vSphere are included at no additional cost with every SPX license and can be configured through a new easy-to-use wizard in the SPX interface. Both SPX and ShadowProtect backups can be booted as guest VMs using VirtualBoot for vSphere. Requirements StorageCraft VirtualBoot for vSphere requires a VMware vSphere cluster with the following: • VMware ESXi 6.0 U2 • VMware vCenter Server 6.0 U2 • StorageCraft ShadowProtect SPX 6.3 • StorageCraft VirtualBoot vSphere Plugin 1.0 The free version of ESXi is not supported. Software Updates The release includes the release of: • StorageCraft ShadowProtect SPX 6.3 • The new StorageCraft VirtualBoot vSphere Plugin 1.0 For further details about the release, please refer to the SPX ReadMe file and the SPX User Guide.