VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘backup’

This session is moderated by Ron Oglesby, Service Director – Virtualization for Glass House Technologies. This is a Datadomain session that I anticipate to be a about the design and implementation issues faced by various Datadomain customers. No internet connection in this room so this will be a delayed post.

Like all the other sessions, the disclaimer slide is shown. I’ve learned from the last session not every session is going to have “forward looking” statements. Ron even commented that the slide was put in all the VMworld 2008 presentations by the VMware legal team.

Ron begins by discussing storage being the number one cost in a virtualization implementation. Snapshots, backups, and VM replication and cloning result in the need for large amounts of storage. Complicate this with the need for faster recovery, management automation, and increasing retention and compliance requirements help skyrocket the storage design footprint. Storage is implemented for virtualization too often as an afterthought.

Ron explains the session is about options for storing and replicating snapshots of VMs and the storage ramifications of server consolidation. The session will also illustrate how deduplication and virtualization complement each other.

The rest of the session was customer testimonials. The following are various comments from the customers that caught my attention. Read the rest of this entry »

A critical piece of the migration to virtual infrastructure is the consideration of how to backup the new virtual machines and the data they contain. Although switching to a full VM backup strategy is desirable, the reality of the required tape or disk media needed to support the large backup file sizes causes companies to continue to use the existing physical environment’s agent based backup.

However, Vizioncore and Datadomain offer a feasible backup solution using commonly available IP based storage that should make IT departments with even the tightest budgets look twice. Combining deduplication with LAN based VM backups to CIFS shares or NFS mounts, this solution provides a cost effective transition to full VM backups with minimal storage space consumed. Datadomain and Vizioncore established a certified partnership for VMware infrastructure in September of 2007 and therefore provide established solutions with technologies proven to work well together.

The image to the right was taken from Vizioncore’s solution .pdf titled Cost Efective Backup & Recovery & Storage for Virtualized Environments with Vizioncore Solutions and Data Domain Deduplication Appliances. The .pdf provides an overview of the design as well as recommendations for ensuring performance. This diagram illustrates a solution for not only VMs but also physical servers backed up as VMs by vRanger Pro’s P2V-DR feature.

To provide more specifics about this solution’s possibilities Read the rest of this entry »

It happens more frequently than I would ever imagine, but from time to time I find clients have not installed the VMware tools in their virtual machine’s (VM) operating system. I find it more often in Linux VMs than Windows, but I’ve discovered it for both types of guests none-the-less. Some times the tools install is overlooked or forgotten, but every once in a while I am told something like “Does Linux needed VMware tools?” or “what do the VMware tools do for me anyways?”.

Well, I do not have any unique insight or clever commentary to add, but I am providing the following cut and pastes from the VMware .pdf Basic System Administration Guide as a easy reference. At the very least this post will save me some time because I won’t have to dig this info out of the .pdf again when I am asked.

The following sections provide info on what you install when you install VMware tools as well as steps for installing the tools for both Windows and Linux VMs. The rest of this post is not my material but comes straight from the linked guide above – although not necessarily in the order it appears in the original document, however. Download and read the current version for yourself! Read the rest of this entry »

If you are running VMware Server on a Linux host and need to automate and schedule a process for backing up your guests then check out Two Bald Geeks’ bash script documented in the post at vmware-server VM backups. In short, the vmsbackup script systematically cycles through all VMs in a designated folder and accomplishes a full guest backup for each. To do this the script suspends the VM, copies it to another location, tars the copied file, removes any existing tars older then a specified time period, and then resumes the source VM again. Creating a Cron job for the script enables the process to be repeated on a scheduled basis.

Here’s some more information taken from the linked post on the strategy behind the script. Read the rest of this entry »

To clone a virtual machine with VirtualCenter you have to power off the guest, but what if your next maintenance window isn’t any time soon, you can’t afford to schedule the outage, or you just need a copy of the VM during normal business hours? Did you know that making a copy of a running, powered on VM is possible. At a high level the process requires a snapshot to freeze the VM’s original disk which in turn allows you to clone the frozen disk. This is essentially the way VCB, vRanger, or any of the live VM backup products work. Therefore, cloning a powered on VM can be accomplished with a little Console command magic.

I want to acknowledge that researching this method was inspired by the VMTN Virtualization Roundtable Episode 1 Podcast’s coverage of snapshots. Specifically Eric Siebert mentions that using VMware Converter as an alternative to committing snapshots is not the best option and offers the idea of using vmkfstools to do the job. Read the rest of this entry »

Carlo Costanzo over at ipmer.com has a great post about how to quickly and easily solve issues resulting from VM snapshots. As Carlo points out, too many administrators misunderstand the ESX snapshot to be a point in time backup and unfortunately do not realize it is instead a live and growing file. More often than not the snapshot is forgotten until the LUN is completely out of space at which time the VM is unstable. Trying to commit the snapshot becomes a time consuming burden.

The post 70GB Snapshot, YIKES! explains how Carlo used some “outside of the box” thinking to use VMware Converter to rescue VMs without going through the commit process. The idea is so simple it’s brilliant! Carlo writes:

Read the rest of this entry »

Upgrading to ESX3.5 and VirtualCeter 2.5 Best Practices is a VMware KB article that lists best practice recommendations when performing the VI upgrade. As explained in the article:

This document provides additional steps which may be useful when upgrading to ESX 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5. It is assumed at this point that you have also read the Upgrade Guide.

Although the article contains 11 items in the list, in my opinion the last few are common steps (place the cd in the cd-rom drive of the host etc.) and not really best practices.
Regardless, review the following before performing the upgrade and follow these recommendations to minimize trouble.
Read the rest of this entry »