VM /ETC

Archive for the ‘virtualization’ Category

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 »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Start your Cinco de Mayo 2011 celebration with one of the largest VMUGs in the Southeast US! The 2011 Carolina Summit is at the Charlotte Convention Center (in Charlotte, NC) on Thursday May 5 from 7:30 am until 4:30 pm. If you are a VMware admin or architect within driving distance be sure to plan to attend. You can register here. I’m particularly excited about the 2:30 pm Panel Discussion on the state of cloud computing, but more on that session later in this post.

Everyone will be there!

Why should you attend? Check out the following samples of featured speakers, sessions, and labs:

Panel Discussion on Cloud Computing
(Rich Brambley, Mike Laverick, Jason Nash, Scott Lowe, Mike Dipetrillo)

Pros & Cons of Stretched Cluster Designs
(Scott Lowe, Industry Speaker)

Cloud in the Real World
(Mike Dipetrillo, VMware)

vCloud Director and VMware View
(Varrow Lab)

Automating vSphere with PowerCLI a Primer
(Aaron Miller, VMware)

VMware View Reference Architecture
(Mac Binesh, VMware)

Of course there will be various VMware and sponsor keynotes and presentations mixed throughout the day. Be sure to catch our Veeam Software session at 10:00 am. The event’s full agenda can be reviewed here.

Panel Discussion – The Sequel

I’m once again honored to get the invite to moderate the Carolina Summit’s featured Panel Discussion at 2:30 pm. I’ll be participating in an open and unscripted “state of the union” conversation about real world cloud computing with Mike Dipetrillo, Scott Lowe, Jason Nash, and Mike Laverick. Like last year, I view my role in this session to be like a co host of a live podcast. The entire VMUG audience, however, is real discussion driver. So, bring your questions for this expert panel!

Can’t make it in person?

Train Signal has partnered with the VMUG organizers and will be interviewing speakers and videoing sessions for those that can’t make it. They will also be live streaming the Keynotes at 8:45 am and 12:45 pm (EST). Find out more be checking out this post:  2011 Charlotte VMUG: Coming to You May 5th. Hopefully Train Signal will decide to live stream the Panel Discussion at 2:00pm as well! I assume vExpert David Davis will be in attendance? Help me reach out to him to include the Panel in Train Signal’s coverage!

Other Coverage

For more great coverage of the 2011 Carolina Summit VMUG also check out:

2011 Carolina VMware User Summit Coming Up – Scott Lowe

On the Road Again: Charlotte, North Carolina Summit – Mike Laverick

VMUG Carolina Summit: Be There or Don’t…See if I Care. No Really. Do Be There – Dustin Pike

VMware Regional Summit in Charlotte, NC! – Jason Nash

Let me know if you can make it!

Veeam recently published a Veeam Reporter Quickstart Guide that can be downloaded here: NEW! Quick Start Guide: Veeam Reporter Dashboard

In short, It was written (by me!) in order to help Veeam customers, evaluators, and free version users understand how to create and save useful VMware reports and use the output of that dynamically updating content for day to day VI Management. This new guide helps you get up and running fast, and provides a primer for building valuable dashboards (click image to the right for a sample dashboard) from those saved reports!

This post contains information for building one of the reports from the new guide – VM Report (By IP Address)

TiVo For Your VMware Infrastructure

The Quickstart Guide gets right to the point by explaining how to create an agentless collection job that constantly updates your reports. Much like if you had a premium subscription with your cable TV provider,

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Because of the prevalence of virtual infrastructure these days, I’ll make the argument that virtual machine (VM) replication, both for business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) purposes, is the new P2V (physical to virtual migration) project. Not in the literal migration of physical to virtual, but in the same P2V concepts of infrastructure consolidation and capacity planning. I’m also talking similarity of process and in the frequency in which it is occurring. Simply put, IT shops that performed P2V migrations several years ago are now exploring how they can accomplish their DR site fail over or their BC needs with their virtual machines.

Let’s call these new generation of projects V4DR (virtualization for disaster recovery) or V4BC (virtualization for business continuity).

The comparison

If I rewind 3 to 5 years ago in my career, capacity planning for server consolidation was a weekly project and topic of discussion. Customers were either in the process of converting physical servers to virtual machines or they were exploring the possibility to do so. In both cases, capacity planning scenario spreadsheets and reports were frequent “ground zero documents” to almost every project plan I was involved in.

Just like P2V projects, VM replication today also requires some of the same considerations for job scalability and times to complete – i.e. using multiple hosts as targets and making sure the network can support getting the job done as quick as possible. Not to mention ip addressing, VLAN assignments, and application connectivity after the fact. Thank goodness we no longer have to deal with hardware drivers and other unneeded software a second time. Hopefully, VM alignment is a thing of the past too!

I’m not seeing the same “ground zero documents” for replication projects, however.

Use the same capacity planning tools?

So, I’ll ask the question:  Read the rest of this entry »

Most backup and VMware  admins already know that Veeam Backup and Replication  (VBR) can do File Level Restores (FLR) for any Virtual Machine running any Guest OS and File System that VMware supports. The default process to restore the files involves using the VBR GUI for auto assembling the VM’s .vmdk from the Veeam Backup Files (without moving data to any additional storage location or starting up the restored VM), and then using the pop-up file browser to “copy to” any location. But, did you know you could allow users to browse the restored VM file system and do their own file restores? From their own desktop or the desktop of the destination system? You won’t find this information in the VBR User Guide today, but it is very easily done.

disclaimer: I am a Systems Engineer for Veeam Software

Now, with VBR version 5 a FLR Appliance can be activated, auto registered, and configured for file level restores. Although the FLR appliance is only used when you select “Guest Files (other OS)” from the Restore options, the Linux based appliance VM can mount NTFS and most other non Windows file systems. By choosing to use this appliance you have the option to enable FTP access to the restored .vmdk thus making the recovered file system(s) easily available from any desktop. Therefore, end users or application owners can just open Windows Explorer, their favorite web browser, or a FTP client to browse, find, and download their recovered files themselves. No additional software needs to be purchased, and if you use the native OS web and file browsers nothing else even needs to be installed.

This means that the only time required by the VMware / Backup admin is the few minutes it takes to click through the Veeam restore wizard and verify the FLR appliance VM is running. Of course, a few extra seconds is required to click to close the FLR GUI when the user is done.

The rest of the post shows the many screen shots of using and configuring the Veeam FLR Appliance Restore option and a few simple, end user alternatives for accessing the restored files from the remote system. 

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