Vizioncore vReplicator 2.1

Virtualisation has been around for a long time but only in the last five years has it ventured out onto commodity servers with VMware leading the market. The reason that virtualisation has been so quickly adopted is cost. The average single application server uses less than 20 per cent of its resources for 95 per cent of the time. With an increasing number of applications becoming business critical, IT departments are often dedicating two servers to ensure that should one fail, the application and the business keeps running.

Making better use of resources means running multiple applications on a server. The problem with this is interaction between the pieces of software. This is where virtualisation becomes attractive. It creates a completely separate environment for each piece of software running it in its own virtual machine. This means that if one application crashes, it doesn't affect the other virtual machines on the server.

A spin off is that rather than dedicate two server to an application, high availability can be achieved by having multiple copies of a virtual machine on different physical machines. Should one copy fail then you can switch users to the second copy. This is also part of any disaster recovery planning where copies can be maintained off-site.

Good ideas often have unexpected consequences. The unexpected consequence of virtualisation has been the explosion of virtual machines in the datacentre. Tracking and managing these machines has become a full time job. For disaster recovery planning, it is essential that replication is done on a reliable and consistent schedule.

While the various virtualisation vendors have their own tools for this, they do require you buy into their large scale enterprise solutions. For those who don't want to commit this way, there needs to be an alternative to managing virtual machines. Vizionsware's vReplicator is one such tool.

So what is in the box? In short, nothing! Like an increasing amount of software today, you download vReplicator from the Vizionware website and start with an evaluation key. When you want to purchase and deploy vReplicator you simply change the licence file.

The software is just a 5MB file from the website and comes as an MSI (Microsoft Installer) file.

Documentation is downloaded from the website. There was a quick setup and getting started guide but the user manual had been replaced with the beta manual for the next version. This was annoying but we expected the built in help file to resolve this.

This proved to be quick, simple but with an unexpected gotcha. To install vReplicator, you run the MSI file that you had previously downloaded. There is no need to install onto a server, you can put the software on any workstation that you want.

The minimum requirements are fairly low end although it does want 2GB of disk space. This is to accommodate the log files over time as the actual software itself takes just 25MB. Vizioncore claims that the software will run on Windows 2000 SP1 or greater. Not quite true. We could not get it to run on Windows Vista at all. On the upside, it will install into its own virtual machine irrespective of whether you use Microsoft or VMware.

There are a small number of other requirements. In order to talk to the VMs vReplicator uses SSH which means that port 22 must be open on the host and the VM you want to talk to. If you are working with VirtualCenter, there are other ports that will need to be configured. This takes just a few moments to configure.