VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘virtualization’

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

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 »

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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Like everyone else, I have been reviewing the Release Notes for the latest Update 1 release of vSphere 4.1, but I decided to point out specific fixes that will make full image VM backups better for everyone. Note that I work for Veeam Software, but the fixes I am referring to are all VMware resolved issues that surface from time to no matter what backup solution you use. There are numerous other fixes and impovements in the U1 release, but, since most of my world is backup these days, these particular items “popped out” at me.

For a great overview of the entire U1 release check out Rick Vanover’s post vSphere 4.1 update 1 released from his Rickatron Blog and via his Servers and Storage Column/Blog at TechRepublic.

The rest of this post contains cut and pastes from the Release Notes and some commentary about them from me. I want to stress again that these are issues that have now been fixed!

Finally, I’ll point out the one huge VM backup issue (that I can think of right now) that still does not appear to be resolved.

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What was once just a fun Twitter game (OK, annoying to some) at previous VMware VMworld and Partner Exchange Conferences is now a chance to win real prizes at VMware’s Partner Exchange 2011 (PEX2011) next week in Orlando, FL. Thanks to several vendors and individuals that responded to Kelly Culwell (@kculw) and my last minute requests, if you are an attendee at PEX2011 and play PEX3WORD you can win the following prizes in the following ways:

• EMC Iomega IX2 – awarded to the best #pex3word tweet with a twit pic of Chad Sakac (@sakacc). Chad knows of this requirement to win, but he prefers the twit pic be one where he does not know it is being taken. Chad will help judge the winner. BTW, it doesn’t have to be an actual “twitpic”. Use whatever tweet photo service you want, but just follow the #pex3word game rules.
• VMware Workstation or Fusion -  awarded to the most informative or insightful #pex3word tweet. John Troyer (@jtroyer) has thrown these licenses in the pot for the game, and he will help us decide a winner for this category. Use 3 words to express your thoughts during a keynote, breakout session, lab, or just when you experience a general technological epiphany!
• Train Signal vSphere Troubleshooting DVD – awarded to the best / funniest /entertaining #pex3word conversation. David Davis (@davidmdavis) will help us decide the winner from the many series of #pex3word RTs and linked replies. Be sure to adhere to the rules of 3word tweeting! If you don’t know already, the Train Signal series of video training  is awesome training to have on your shelf or on your iPod/iPad/iPhone or smartphone, and the latest vSphere Troubleshooting DVD dives even deeper into VMware vSphere management.
• VMware vSphere Design by Forbes Guthrie, Scott Lowe, and Maish Saidel-Keesing. – awarded to the most frequent #pex3word tweeter. Scott Lowe (@scott_lowe) has agreed to ship this winner a copy when the books comes out! By frequent tweets we mean relevant and unique. Tweeting “one two three” a million times for example won’t win you anything, but Scott will ultimately help us decide this winner. No bots or scripts either. To be fair, we are only counting number of tweets between Tues and Thurs during the conference for this award. That way, those showing up early for boot camps and meetings do not have an unfair advantage.

Finally, we have several miscellaneous items such as t-shirts, umbrellas, bottle openers, etc. from Veeam and InterWorks for those #pex3word tweeters that don’t win anything above. This is not the booth swag that anyone can get at the conference, but these items were donated specifically for this game.

How to play and General Game Info

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