Nick Triantos has posted another brilliant post over at his Storage Nuts & Bolts blog about VMware Site Recovery Manager and the adapter that NetApp have created to plug into SRM.

The article talks about what is supported in the SRA (Site Recovery Adapter) including:

• SnapMirror integration with SRM
• Support for Sync, Async & Semi Sync
• Dissimilar H/W configuration support
• FC & iSCSI Support
• FlexClone support for DR testing

He also ponders on what VMware might want to consider for future releases including:

• Multiple live sites to a single DR site
• Failback as well as Failover
• NFS Support

If you can it is well worth bookmarking his site, or even better using the RSS feed to get the new posts immediately.

ClusterScale have recently announced a VMware ESX compatible Virtual Applicance that offers almost all the functionality associated with their hardware counterpart.

The VA offers Layer 4-7 functionality and a myriad of features including:

• Ultra-High Availability
• VMware certified
• Rapid deployment and flexibility

You can download a 15 day fully functioning trial version here and can read all about the product here.

I have never deployed this live, but I can tell you that having used the trial version if the right customer comes along, I think it will be an easy sell.

The guys over at PSS SQL Blog have written a short but really sweet article about how to really detect whether you have a bottleneck with SQL Server implementations.

It gives a few pointers of what to look for if you really start digging including:

• PAGE I/O Waits (select * from sys.dm_os_wait_stats where wait_type like ‘%PAGEIO%’)
• Virtual File Stats (select * from sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats(-1, -1))
• Stalled I/O Warnings
• Additional disk based performance counters and available hardware utilities

I found this useful recently when SQL Server was virtualised and all other methods of monitoring looked fine (perfmon, vCharter), but couldn’t find the problem.