VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘free’

The average virtualization admin, engineer, manager, and general IT person probably goes to half a dozen events a year where they receive a name badge. I’m just guessing, but at least 2/3 of those event badges are now in the form of a necklace/lanyard. Just guessing again, but I’d be willing to bet that 99% of all the lanyards get thrown away shortly after. That same average IT person probably attends 1 or 2 big events or conferences a year where they are lucky enough to receive a backpack, computer bag, or other schwag with zippers. Unfortunately, the pull tabs on the zippers more than likely will break off leaving an awkward and often painful to pull open/closed zipper head. I’ve stopped using several otherwise very functional bags just for this reason. But, while planning for a recent vacation, an idea so simple struck me that I was amazed I hadn’t thought of it already.

I did not want to take my full computer bag on the vacation. It’s an oversized bag designed for an entire file cabinet and a night’s change of clothes. One of my old backpacks was perfect for my notebook, iPad, magazines, and the various accessories my wife and I would need on the plane and while sightseeing. When I went to grab a backpack in my basement I noticed the nail of badges hanging above them.

For some reason, I can not bring myself to throw away my event badges. I can’t tell you why. I just knew I would do something with them one day. But now I have a new purpose for them, and I am quickly reducing the bulk hanging on that nail. Besides, you never would have seen a headline like “North Georgia Man Saves Family From Burning House With A Linked Lanyard Ladder”, now would you?

So if you are like me you already have what you need to repair your luggage, backpacks, and various other pull zippers around the house. Here’s my quick how to and list of tools needed:

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Veeam products can be installed on the same virtual machine allowing administrators to easily create a cost effective and valuable solution for documenting, managing, and maintaining ESX datacenters. With the recent announcement of free Veeam NFRs for VCPs, VCDXs, vExperts, and VCIs, many will be looking to build VMs to explore Veeam products. This post serves as a high level guide for combining the free versions of Veeam Reporter, Veeam Monitor, and Veeam Business View to create a single “Veeam ONE” Monitor Plus VM.

BTW, you might have missed that Veeam’s products were voted the top 3 free tools for vSphere by the virtualization community?! Check out vmwarevideos.com and vChat – Episode 11 – Results of the Best Free vSphere Tools Survey & Answering Viewer Questions.

Although I am using the free versions in this post, the process is the same for the licensed versions as well. See a comparison of free versus licensed features here for Reporter and here for Monitor.

FYI, all Veeam products can be downloaded in a fully functioning 30 day trial mode.  I highly recommend admins utilize them for a test drive this way, and when the trial expires the products will default to the free versions.

For larger environments, installing Monitor and Reporter in their own separate VMs may result in better performance. All products can share the same remote SQL or SQLExpress instance for their databases, however. Refer to each product’s current Release Notes and User Guide for planning, installation, and configuration information.

Disclaimer: I am a Senior Systems Engineer for Veeam Software.

Recommended Veeam ONE server requirements (for Proof of Concepts, SMBs, and some MID size datacenters)

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Veeam has a history of offering free products as a Christmas gift to the virtualization community, and 2010 is no exception. In fact, this year’s present is probably the biggest one yet. From the official press release:

NEW VEEAM BACKUP & REPLICATION V5 IS FREE TO VMWARE VEXPERTS, VMWARE CERTIFIED PROFESSIONALS AND VMWARE CERTIFIED INSTRUCTORS

Veeam offers free license keys for non-production use as holiday gift

Columbus, Ohio, December 10, 2010 – Veeam Software, innovative provider of VMware data protection, disaster recovery and VMware management solutions for virtual datacenter environments, today announced a holiday gift for VMware vExperts, VMware Certified Professionals, and VMware Certified Instructors. These individuals can receive Veeam Backup & Replication™ v5 with vPower™ for non-production use in their home labs. Any vExpert, VCP or VCI can receive a free two-CPU socket software license for evaluation, demonstration and training purposes. The offer also includes the Veeam ONE™ Solution for VMware management with Veeam Monitor™, Veeam Reporter™ and Veeam Business View™.

That’s right. A free NFR for all Veeam products listed above! Go get your free Veeam NFRs at http://www.veeam.com/go/free-nfr-license.

They don’t script Christmas Stories any better than this

The idea for this year’s gift actually came from a wish in the form of a tweet.

Check out the official Veeam Blog post for more about Veeam being Santa in a green and white suit.

TIPs FROM A VEEAM ELF

The NFRs are great, but all Veeam products are available as fully functioning 30 day downloads for up to 16 sockets. So,

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A common request since I started at Veeam Software has been for the ability to plug in Veeam’s products to vCenter and/or the vSphere Client. After all, VMware admins are used to the idea that they can go to the same interface to accomplish almost everything. VMware’s strategy to make their client expandable via a plugin architecture is brilliant, and many Technology Partners have introduced vCenter and vSphere Client plugins for their products as a result.  Veeam, for whatever reasons (maybe because the developers have been focused on new game changing features!), has not created plugins to date. However, since most of the Veeam Software suite has web pages for management interfaces already, it is very simple to create plugins yourself!

This post  provides unofficial, unsupported template files and a basic “how to” instructions for using vSphere Client plugins for the following Veeam web management interfaces:

• Veeam Backup and Replication Enterprise Management Console
• Veeam Reporter Dashboard
• Veeam Business View Dashboard

These plugins should work whether you are using any Veeam product versions or whether you have the paid or free versions of Monitor and Reporter. Bottom line: If you can make the Veeam web pages work correctly in a standard web browser on the system where you have the vSphere Client installed, then the plugins should work too.

You may have noticed that Veeam Monitor has been left out of the plugin list. That is because Monitor does not have a web interface. However, be sure to read the end of this post to see how you can use the vSphere Client from within Veeam Monitor. It’s “the photo negative” of what VMware admins are used to, but it accomplishes the same benefits.

Also understand, you can use the templates as a base for whatever web interface you want to pull into the vSphere Client.  This is not just applicable to Veeam products.

I want to credit Carter Shanklin, Eric Sloof, and Ricky El-Qasem for originally providing information about how to create web based plugins several years ago. El-Qasem even released a handy .NET tool for auto creating and registering plugins with vCenter which involved making the resulting .xml files centrally available via Tomcat from the vCenter Server. I followed the trail of crumbs from these guys.

Download the Veeam vSphere Plugin templates

Veeam vSphere Plugin Templates (657)

The rest of this post contains basic instructions, some screen shots, and a tip for making Reporter work correctly in the vSphere Client. Finally, integrating Veeam Monitor and the vSphere Client is covered briefly.

How To Modify the Templates and Instructions for Using the Plugins

The following is the contents of the README file included in the .zip

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I happened to find the Paragon Go Virtual free P2V migration tool when trying to find a disk image back up tool for my notebook. This free tool is designed for desktops only and only works with the following OSes:

• Windows 7 (32/64-bit)
• Windows Vista (32/64-bit)
• Windows XP (32/64-bit)
• Windows 2000 Professional

Here are some self described key features per the web site:

“Full Windows OS Support - Guaranteed support for any Windows operating system since Win2K (excluding server editions).

P2V Migration - Migrate a physical system to a virtual environment by converting all installed software and data into a virtual disk of the required virtual machine.

Migration without rebooting Windows - Hot processing of locked (in-use) hard disks lets you migrate a computer without rebooting and interrupting Windows.

P2V Adjust OS to recover the startup ability after unsuccessful virtualization with a 3rd party tool and to make Windows Vista/7 backups bootable on virtual hardware.

Smart Driver Injector - Makes the process of adding new drivers smooth and easy.

Performance – Paragon Go Virtual performs approximately 20% faster (your results may vary).

P2V adjust OS – Freeware tools will not adjust the OS to virtual hardware, leaving the user unable to boot their virtual machine. Go Virtual adjusts the OS so the virtual machine will boot successfully.

Selection of virtual hardware – Go Virtual offers the user a selection of virtual hardware types. Freeware tools typically do not.

Migration of offline systems - Freeware tools support the migration of operating systems currently running, but they have problems migrating offline operating systems, especially when there are more than one OS on the disk. Go Virtual performs these operations with ease.”

Also per the Paragon web site:

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This week on VIRTUMANIA we focus on Xangati’s ability to record network activity between VMs and hosts on virtual infrastructure. The following is the podcast summary:

VIRTUMANIA Podcast Episode 24 – De-Funkified V.I. Rich Brambley (@rbrambley) of VMETC and Marc Farley (@3parfarley) of 3Par and StorageRap.com with guests and Rick Vanover (@rickvanover) of RickVanover.com and Ed Haletky (@texiwill) of The Virtualization Practice Blog and The Virtualization Security Podcast. This week’s episode features special guest Nathaniel Iverson, Director of Product Marketing at Xangati. With Xangati’s announcement of the free Xangati appliance for ESX, virtualization administrators now have a cost effective tool to auto record activity inside their virtual infrastructure and more easily prescribe the proper remedy to alleviate the symptoms. Virtumania is an Infosmack Production.

Listen to the podcast with the embedded player or subscribe to get a weekly copy so you can listen when convenient.

Check out the VM /ETC VIRTUMANIA Page to listen to past episodes as well as episodes of Infosmack.

Although VIRTUMANIA 18 has been out via the RSS feed for over a week, I am just finally posting about it! Sorry for the delay but I’ve been on vacation. So, if you do not already subscribe to the show via iTunes or Podbean please add us to your favorite media player or feed reader. You can even catch Virtumania as soon as it comes out on the Mobile Site.

In this episode Rick Vanover joins me again as co-host, and Jason Perlow from ZDNet is our special guest. The following is the podcast summary:

VIRTUMANIA Podcast Episode 18 – Putting The Mustard On Free Virtualization Charcuterie. Rich Brambley (@rbrambley) of VMETC  and Rick Vanover (@rickvanover) of RickVanover.com host popular technology and foodie blogger Jason Perlow (@jperlow) of Tech Broiler and Off The Broiler. In this episode we explore and compare several free virtualization solutions available today. Like selecting cuts of meat from a butcher, there is always plenty of choices. Consider this episode a delicious virtualization Charcuterie. Virtumania is an Infosmack Production.

Listen to the podcast with the embedded player or subscribe to get a weekly copy so you can listen when convenient.

Check out the VM /ETC VIRTUMANIA Page to listen to past episodes as well as episodes of Infosmack.

The following links offer more information on some of the topics mentioned in VIRTUMANIA Episode 18:

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