VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘vcb’

It is a saying made famous by former talk show host and comedian Arsenio Hall. It is the title of a C + C Music Factory dance hit. Now “Things that make you go hmmmm” will be a series of posts on VM /ETC that provide links and news related to virtualization, but that’s humorous, strange, or entertaining in nature. I’ll try to collect links and post them every Friday. Help me out if you find something that makes you go “hmmmm”.

So, without any further delay, pump your fist and say “Woof! Woof! Woof!” for the first set of links: Read the rest of this entry »

When I was linking to RTFM Education from my post Combining multiple VMware .lic files is a thing of the past I noticed Mike wrote a quick post about discovering the new LAN based backup features of VCB. I had to get my own copy of the VMware Consolidated Backup Improvements in Version 3.5 .pdf and understand the new LAN-based backup feature. In short, the requirement for a storage area network, and therefore the installation of VCB on a physical server with HBA(s) has been removed. Installing VCB on a Windows 2003 virtual machine is now possible. Maybe not recommended for larger environments, but possible and a achievable design for smaller infrastructures.

The .pdf also reveals that there are several other new features of VCB that were previously restrictions of the older versions. Read the rest of this entry »

updated 03.13.08 – Unfortunately I declared victory too soon on this issue. I got a status update this week and the customer can deploy from template in some scenarios but is still getting the same error at times. The HP SIM agents are still turned off and have not been ruled out as part of the problem, but IBM has provided a recommended design and they have made the changes.

As Brian points out in his comment the customer has a multiple IBM SVC design in front of multiple storage devices.

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Last week I helped a customer resolve an issue where whenever they deployed a new VM from a template the job would fail with the error “Failed to deploy template: The virtual disk is either corrupted or not a supported format” We were troubleshooting numerous ESX servers and the problem was the same on all the hosts. The template was fine. We changed it back to a VM and turned it on without issue. The vmtools and virtual hardware were up to date.

Surprisingly the Virtual Center error message was not well indexed on Google. I was scratching my head until I stumbled across the VMware Communities thread Read the rest of this entry »

A Few Thoughts on Xen posted on blog.scottlowe.org got me thinking about the pricing differences between Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX Server. It is a general assumption that Xen Server is more affordable than ESX. I decided to figure out exactly what the products cost and how they compare to each other. I am not factoring in the cost of Sales and Support in this post because I would want that regardless of which vendor I choose.

I found Citrix XenServer list pricing from a Citrix presentation slide deck that was presented to me via a webinar several weeks ago. Click on the image to see a larger version. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the engineers from our storage team asked me to join a discussion about whether or not restoring VMs from images made by any of the live VM backup utilities would be a reliable process for a client. I unknowingly joined what was really a battle about whether the client would be better off using SAN based snapshots, host based replication, or live VM imaging specifically for Exchange and SQL VMs. All are proven solutions, and depending on budget, recovery objectives, and service level agreements all solutions could be deployed with confidence. The customer, and this post, is focused on the live VM backup solutions and their reliability for Exchange and SQL. Based on cost of implementation and infrastructure required the VM backup tools are the most affordable and easiest to deploy, but they also leave you with the most uncertainty.

Before continuing I want to point out that normal backup agents still need to be used for Exchange and SQL VMs. Not one of the VM backup solutions can perform application maintenance or specialized backups, like the Exchange Information Store backup for example. Understand that the live VM backup tools only specialize in capturing a quiescent, working image of the VM operating system and application.

First let’s understand what we mean when we say quiescent data. In the latest VMware Virtual Machine Backup Guide quiescing is defined as: Read the rest of this entry »

I ran into a frustrating issue this week where VCB was backing up everything except the .vmdk files. The vcbMounter.exe command would run and finish without errors, but when I checked the backed up files in the VCB Proxy’s “holding tank” LUN everything was there but the virtual disks. I was troubleshooting with a 20 GB Server 2003 VM and the command finished in about 30 seconds. During the troubleshooting I watched Virtual Center announce it was creating the snapshot and then immediately delete the snapshot. It did not error. There were no clues in any of the logs. It wasn’t until the -L 6 option (verbose) was added to the vcbMounter command that I was able to see the problem.

It turns out that the VM’s virtual disks were Independent. The VM was originally created on a ESX 2.X host a couple of years ago. I had helped the customer migrate to VI3 last year. Apparently the migrated and upgraded virtual hardware maintained the older disk settings. Once we powered down the VM and unchecked the Independent feature VCB backed up the .vmdk files. Unfortunately there are more than 50 VMs this customer will have to schedule shutdowns for in order to uncheck the Independent disk setting.

Independent virtual disks do not allow snapshots. Snapshots are required in order to use VCB. VCB works by creating a snapshot, which freezes the VM temporarily and then sends future disk activity to a “disk buffer”. The original .vmdks are then static and can be copied to the “holding tank”. Once VCB has finished copying the .vmdks the “disk buffer” is committed to the original disk and then the VM is “thawed” backed to normal. VMs created on ESX 3.x hosts do not have the Independent disk option enabled by default.

When you use VCB you have to specify either ESX root or VC2 administrator credentials. These credentials are added and easily found stored in the required vcb-pre-backup and vcb-post-backup .bat files, and the config.js file when using a third party backup integration module. Therefore, a best practice is to create a new user that has the required permissions for backing up VMs. The new user, vcbuser, will allow you to keep your administrator and root accounts secure.

In the latest version of VC, VC2.5, the vcbuser role and permissions are predefined and called “VMware Consolidated Backup User”. The steps in this post are intended only for VC2.02 and earlier.

To create the vcbuser do the following: Read the rest of this entry »