VTL
THe storage team has been evaluating the EMC EDL Virtual Tape Library solution for a little over a month. It has seemed to fill the void ITS has been expericencing in the backup environment for the past few years. The EDL will give us growth capacity for one year, which allows us to begin to take on new backup clients. The EDL also speeds up read operations, so we can do multiple cloning sessions much faster than previous technologies would allow. We also increased the throughput with the EDL because we went from 12 target devices to 96 target devices which allows ITS to do more work in the same amount of time.
Backup Reporting
ITS is developing tools to allow us to get better information on the data we are backing up. For example, there are numerous backup clients with databases. The databases running cannot be backup up live without networker modules. Thus clinets without the networker module do not need to have thier hot databases backed up as theses will be corrupt upon restore. This application provides this granular visibaility, as well as additional data such as largest backup client, largest files, and the prevalent extension types.
Virtual Desktop
ITS has made big strides of improvement in our Virtual Desktop project. We have successfully configured pools to allow the automatic creation of windows XP VM’s and joining them to the domain. THe team is now looking into the phase 2 and phase 3 implementations of this project which will starts to reveals the cost savings capabilities of a service such as this. We are looking into a “one-to-many” configuration which means that we are only using one actual virtual machine stored on disk, that no user accesses (this is our golden image we use to create the VM’s for virtual desktop). THe next steps to achieve this goal is to create 8K snapshots of the golden image, therefore every copy of the golden image only uses 8K of additional disk space for overhead. Since these are snapshots and will get destroyed with some frequency, we do not encourage users to store data on the virtual machine. Instead we are looking into “roaming profiles” at an OU level, that would allow user settings to move with the user, but limited to the current organizational unit in active directory. Once we get this configuration we will look into phase 3 which is on demand application streaming. This allows us to install / manage software independently of the virtual machine itself. When users need an application on the application streaming server, it will be delivered to the VM on demand.