While many of you wonder why I am explaining manual Disaster Recovery failback when using VMware Site Recovery Manager where its an automated feature that is included in VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5. Two main scenarios where this apply, the first one if you still using any vCenter Site Recovery Manager prior to VMware SRM 5. The other one if you need to break the replication then recover back without syncing back the changes that happened at the Disaster Recovery Site. In this scenario you won’t be able to use the automated failback feature of VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5 as that sync the changes back to production in the process which you might not desire. For both of these scenarios the below steps become handy.

Its that day where you thought finally you got everything working perfectly with your Exchange infrastructure & your manager walk in and say our old storage where your Microsoft Exchange Server is installed is getting out of warranty and the good news we are replacing it with this new shiny storage box which should give us a better performance and durability. I need this done in a week time. Now you start scratching your head on how to move you Microsoft Exchange 2003 Cluster or Microsoft Exchange 2007 SCC(Single Copy Cluster) to the new SAN. While my article here can not do the work for you. It will show you how you can do it with ease, & without doing mailbox movement although that might be another good way to do it if you have extra hardware for it! Below is how to migrate your Microsoft Exchange Cluster to a new SAN. As well you can find my article on migrating SQL at: http://www.tsmguru.com/data-migration/microsoft-sql-cluster-data-migration-to-a-new-san.html

As with every IT environment new elements and upgrades are becoming a daily task rather than being a yearly task few years back. One of the most consuming upgrade task is storage migration. Your boss has just bought this new shiny storage box & he got it installed by the vendor in the datacenter. Now he need you to move all your production workload to it in no time. Well, if you are in a totally virtualized enviornment and has no Microsoft Clusters in place, then this can be easy and dandy with features like VMware Storage VMotion(ah sorry Only VMware offer such a feature at the moment, but that is not our topic for the day. Anyway did you choose the right Virtualization Product? Hope So!).  If you still in the physical world then this is much more work even for non clustered machines, but machines with Microsoft Clusters will be the ones to involve the most amount of work. In this Article I will show you how to migrate Microsoft SQL Cluster Data from your old SAN to a new one  If MS Exchange is what you are looking for then look at: Migrating Exchange 2007/2003 Cluster to a new SAN. The same steps should work for:

As I have been exposed to Virtualization, Storage & Disaster recovery solutions for quite long, PHD Virtual has approached me to give a feedback on their latest PHD Virtual Backup and Replication v5.3.1 for VMware vSphere. As I had a couple of hours today, I decided to see what I can a accomplish in them messing around with PHD Virtual Backup and Replication v5.3.1 for VMware vSphere in my home lab. At this post I will document the features I like most of the product, what I believe missing as well a high level steps of how to use the product.

Many Many Many time I have been called to diagnose a VMware ThinApp problem specially VMware ThinApp package slowness and all it end up to be nothing more than a problem being caused by an antivirus or anti-malware software that has not been configured according to VMware ThinApp Antivirus best practices. Ah I can see already few of you are shocked there is such a thing out there! OK, now I have told you there is best practices for Antivirus configuration in a VMware ThinApp environment I will go ahead and explain them and where they apply.