VM /ETC

Aug 19, 2011

Aug 22, 2011

rbrambley via twitter "@BorgCollective_: @rbrambley YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED" > beam me up #vmworld3word

rolltidega via twitter Viva Las VMworld! #vmworld3word

keithnorbie via twitter I’m gonna WuPaaS #vmworld3word

rodos via twitter #VMworld3word Airport VMworld bound

Aug 23, 2011

Aug 24, 2011

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Recently a disgruntled vSphere administrator was able to delete 88 of his former employer’s virtual machines (VMs) remotely from a McDonald’s WiFi connection. We all know virtualization makes things a lot easier, and unfortunately, this is a scary example of the dark side of just that. I’ll argue it’s also a wake up call for IT departments to realize how virtualization changes the dynamics of data center security,  risk management, and overall data vulnerability, but I’ll leave that for the experts in those fields. What made me go “hmmmm” was the thought “what if I was on the team that had to investigate and recover from this incident?” I also wondered “What if the attack was less obvious?” What if only slight configuration changes were made to the virtual machines instead of  obvious deletions? For example adding limits and reservations to the vCPU and vRAM of the virtual guests or their resource pools thus making them sluggish, unresponsive, and unable to conduct business as usual.

How Long Would It Take To Troubleshoot And Recover?

Put yourself on the team that suddenly realized 88 VMs were gone! Where would you start? The storage  jumps out at me as a logical place to begin, but after your storage area network  is online, healthy, and normal then what? It’s time to try to crack open the VMware Black Box and scour event logs, alarms, permissions, and actions. Put that aside for a minute and think about how would you start the rebuild process and get the business reconnected!?

I don’t have an easy answer. My goal is asking you to think about this for yourself.

Warning! The Veeam Pitch

Since I work with Veeam products every day I’ll briefly suggest how they could help in this scenario. Decide for yourself what tools are best for your company. I’ll point out that Read the rest of this entry »

What is this?

Learn to play.

Resistance is futile!

CiL Console after the page break

RSS Feed for all tweets here Read the rest of this entry »

This is just a quick note that the previous issue with vSphere customers using NFS storage and CBT has been resolved with a recent patch. More on the previuous problem and the new patch in this KB article:

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1031106

The KB was updated 7.26.11

This post explains functionality of Veeam Backup and Replication (BaR) that you are not going to see in the User Guide. I was browsing the Veeam Forums and came across this thread – Backing up Veeam / vCentre Physical Machine which inspired me to write this post. The thread is actually about having an with an issue using with the scheduled backup of a physical vCenter server, which also happens to be running Veeam Backup and Replication, using another product.

I’ll get right to it. You can make a backup copy of physical SQL databases with Veeam BaR. Both vCenter and Veeam BaR have a SQL backend. You can’t schedule this as a job, but there are several scenarios where you could take advantage of a quick and easy, one time, manual backup  – before an upgrade or patch, for example.

Although I work for Veeam, this is not necessarily an intended or fully supported usage of the product. This is an easy alternative for the VMware admin to CYA , however.

I’ll start with a brief introduction on how the SQL U-AIR wizard is supposed to work, and then I will explain how you can use an admin switch to make a backup copy of SQL database whether on a VM or a physical server. VMware vCenter and Veeam BaR/Monitor/Reporter all have SQL back ends. 

The U-AIR Up There

To do this you can use the SQL U-AIR wizard. U-AIR stands for Universal Application Item Recovery, and there are 4 stand alone .exes for the various U-AIR wizards of Veeam BaR – AD, Exchange, SQL, and Universal. All of these wizards can be installed on the Veeam BaR server or on any Windows system that can communicate with Veeam. They could be installed on an admins desktop or the SQL, Exchange, or Domain Controller servers too.

Normally, the purpose of the U-AIR wizard is to request and kick off a workflow for a Veeam vPower Virtual Lab. Once the request is approved and managed by the VMware/Veeam administrator and the “Lab Manager–like” virtual lab is ready with the fenced off, running backup copy of the VM(s), the U-AIR wizards allow for the restore from the backup copy VM to the original production VM. For SQL VMs in particular, the restore options are shown in the following screen shot:

Watch this 4 minute video to see the normal SQL restore functionality of the wizard. This video skips the workflow request, skips the wait for approval and virtual lab start up, and just shows what is possible from a backup copy of a SQL VM. I also want to mention that this is an agentless solution. You do not need to install and manage agents anywhere with Veeam BaR.

Trick The System for Physical SQL backups

You can skip the workflow process of starting and using the vPower Virtual Lab if you use an undocumented (as far as I know) Admin Switch for the U-AIR wizards. I’ll focus on the SQL U-AIR wizard for the rest of this post, but it is the same for the Exchange and AD wizards as well.

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I’ve had the luxury of staying away from the math of the new vSphere 5 licensing. Honestly, I haven’t read the new guide, and I’ve only skimmed through posts that explore the pros and cons of different upgrade costs and future growth impact scenarios from virtualization admins, consultants, and architects of  various size VMware virtual infrastructures. My opinion to date – VMware’s goal is to be a total Cloud solution, and this change in licensing reflects and fosters that plan. If you are able to correctly size you infrastructure, or if you can oversubscribe it so that you can offset the costs, then the hypervisor with the most features, the best performance, and the best partner ecosystem (in terms of available third party products leveraging vSphere APIs) is still a no-brainer. That would be vSphere 5.

Storm Clouds

I’ve also read the virtualization pundits’ predictions year after year. They usually go something like “this year is the year of VDI”, “sixty something percent of all servers can still be virtualized”, and “VMware’s market share will shrink to the advances of Microsoft and Citrix”. Is the record skipping? (does anyone know what a skipping record is anymore?). Personally, I’ve always felt a balanced market of hypervisor vendors would be the most likely prophecy for the datacenter, but VMware has always managed to innovate and stay ahead of the competition. Feature-wise, they continue to do so. But, the recent announcement of licensing changes may have changed things.

Whether right, wrong, misunderstood, reluctant to change, or just emotional, many VMware shops initially viewed the new licensing announcement like dark, thunder clouds approaching. Some reactions were as hot as a flash of lightning. Virtual warning sirens sounded across the community, but after a few days and some damage control from VMware, eventually calmer heads prevailed. But, like in the aftermath of any large storm, people began to build for the future. More so than ever before, public discussion of future plans seem to include a new possibility of alternative vendor virtual datacenters.

An Opening In The Clouds

My hunch is that current VMware shops will  Read the rest of this entry »

David Davis recently posted the video of the Ask The Experts Session from the Carolina Summit 2011 VMUG. In this session, I was fortunate enough to repeat my role (from the 2010 Summit) as session moderator, but the stars of the session were  the experts from the panel consisting of Scott Lowe, Jason Nash, Mike Laverick and Mike DiPetrillo. These guys definitely drove an incredible and informative discussion about Cloud Computing, but more importantly, the information was focused on Cloud adoption concepts, concerns, and options from the perspective of the IT department.

Watch the video below. It’s just shy of 45 minutes in length.

VIDEO: Ask the Expert with Scott Lowe, Rich Brambley, Jason Nash, Mike Laverick and Mike DiPetrillo.