I have the opportunity to work with some really smart people who do some really great things with technology. Steven Duckaert is a co worker and friend who is one of those IT guys who takes what is possible and makes it Reality! Recently I saw him do a demonstration of integrating Veeam Backup & Replication and System Center to automate VM recovery. I asked him to write it up so I could put it on the Blog. The following post is what he wrote. It’s a great Post! Thanks Steven!
One of the promises of the Private Cloud message is that IT resources can quickly be scaled up or down through automation. This is very desirable in order to instantly meet business requirements in the case of failed IT components such as a virtual machine (VM).
This is a great promise but how can you achieve this in your company? How can you realize this promise for your customers? The answer is pretty simple: combine the power of the Microsoft System Center stack and Veeam Backup & Replication. Each of these products have significant capabilities that enhance the Private Cloud Experience. Instead of listing all the goodies that comes with System Center 2012 and Veeam Backup & Replication 6.1, let me describe a real-world use case of why you should combine these two products.
Let’s assume that because of a software issue (everyone knows it is never the system administrators fault ;-) ) a Virtual Machine becomes inaccessible causing the mail application to be offline. This is mission critical to the business. Thankfully this customer invested in System Center 2012 and Veeam Backup & Replication!! The customer has put an automated recovery workflow in place that kicks off as soon as there is an incident raised in System Center Service Manager. This workflow or run book will, based on the created incident, recover the virtual machine within minutes! The run book will launch the virtual machine straight from the backup file with the use of Veeam’s patent-pending vPower technology.
Still not sure how this works? Or do you have some doubts? Then check out this real-time video that demonstrates the results of the System Center Orchestrator run book.
Here’s how it works.
1. The Virtual Machine becomes inaccessible. The name of the Virtual Machine in this example is “WANem”
2. A user submits an incident in System Center Service Manager 2012 (manual action)
3. The System Center Orchestrator run book kicks in and takes the following actions automatically:
a. Checks for an existing backup of the impacted Virtual Machine?
b. Restart the Virtual Machine immediately from the Veeam backup file.
c. Resolve the manual created incident
d. Create a change request to migrate the Virtual Machine from the vPower data store to a production data store
This example illustrates how easy it is to realize one of the great Private Cloud promises: An agile, elastic and self-healing IT infrastructure.
Are run books interesting for you or your customers? Please feel free to comment on this example and do not hesitate to post other run book ideas!
