I’ve been asked by Microsof’ts Central Region Evangelists to participate in a series of blog posts called “30 Days of Cloud”. This is an effort by Microsoft’s Evangelist team to create 30 posts in 30 days all talking about “The Cloud” and of course Microsoft technologies and enabling the private, public and hybrid cloud. The series is created by Matt Hester, Brian Lewis, John Weston, and Kevin Remde and I’m happy to put my own 2 cents in on this series.

As Kevin pointed out in part 7, there are resources to help VMware IT Pros understand how to work with Hyper-V. This is extremely helpful, especially if you need to run a mixed environment of both VMware and Microsoft virtualization technologies. If you end up with a mixed environment, the next question is how do you manage it all? SCVMM has been able to connect to your VMware environment since the beginning. With System Center 2012, you’ll also be able to connect to a Citrix XenServer environment. Of course with SCVMM 2012 you’ll have the ability to define your compute “fabric” as detailed in Yung Chou’s post, Fabric, Oh, Fabric. This means that once defined, it shouldn’t matter if your hypervisor is ESX(i), Citrix XenServer or Hyper-V.

Coexistence is key

Getting all these virtualization platforms defined in SCVMM is a great start but then you have to consider how to keep track of it all. How many times has “virtualization” been blamed for issues in your environment when the real cause is something unrelated? Only through comprehensive monitoring of the virtualization fabric can you get true app-to-metal visibility in your environment. For Systems Center Operations Manager, Microsoft already has a Management Pack for Hyper-V and Citrix recommends the ComTrade Citrix XenServer Management Pack. On the VMware side, Veeam has been offering a Management Pack for VMware since the MOM days.

I bring up the importance of monitoring because when you have multiple platforms it’s very important from an operational sense to make sure you have solid metrics for each. Thanks to the extensibility of System Center Operations Manager, there are numerous 3^rd party management packs available for a wide range of systems and operating systems. Veeam just happens to make a great Management Pack for VMware. For a good overview, check out a recent Webinar we did with Pete Zerger, MVP – OpsMgr, Cameron Fuller, MVP - OpsMgr and Alec King, product manager for the MP.

Author bio:

Doug Hazelman is the Vice President of Product Strategy for Veeam Software. Doug shares his expertise via the Veeam blog, and other social media outlets. Doug has spoken about virtualization management at VMworld 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, Interop, and other events including regional VMUG meetings.

Be sure to stop by the Veeam booth (813) at VMworld in Las Vegas. There you can get and exclusive sneak peek of Veeam Backup & Replication v6. (See last week’s post on what to expect from Veeam at VMworld). One increasingly popular item to look out for are the new “Protected by Veeam” laptop and server rack stickers.

We’re having fun with the stickers and we want you to do the same, so we’re announcing a contest! Pick up a sticker, place it somewhere and take a picture. The Veeam staff favorites will win. We will select six winners for $60 Amazon gift cards next week based on pictures shared via Twitter. Be sure to use the #Veeam hash tag and we’ll be sure to notice it and re-Tweet the picture!

Enjoy VMworld 2011!

VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas is right around the corner and the Veeam Teeam will be there! I don’t know about you, but VMworld is a busy time of year and we are right in the thick of it all now. I look forward to the convergence of the virtualization community on this event, as well as checking out all of the new products that make up our segment of IT. This year at the show, Veeam has a packed agenda and plenty of ways to interact. Here are some points for the show:

More >

One of the cool features of Veeam Backup & Replication v5 is its ability to document the status of the virtual machine backup within the virtual machine’s annotations by using attributes. This is one of the many notification options for an individual job, which may contain one or more virtual machines. Other notification options are also available, including email and SNMP.

More >

Virtualization is surely one of the most disruptive technologies to impact the datacenter. But what about considering the impact of virtualization to each of our lives? How has virtualization changed your life?

We are launching a new promotion called, “Tweet to Win.” Tweet to Win is a simple contest in that we are looking for Tweets that show how virtualization has changed your lives. If your Tweet is chosen, you win an iPod Touch!

This Twitter contest has only two guidelines:

1.Tweets must have the #Veeam hashtag

2.Tweets must be posted between April 15 through April 18

The best Tweet according to our staff will be the winner, and we will announce the winner on April 21. Follow Veeam on Twitter to stay up-to-date with this contest. Good luck and happy Tweeting!

John Troyer over at VMware has set up yet another great resource for the virtualization community. The VMware Communities: Virtualization Podcasts page is a great place to find podcasts. We’ve placed VMware-related episodes from the Veeam Community Podcast on that page also.

The goal of this VMware Communities page is to be about the community and the resources that we all bring to the table. It is not a place for marketing overload! In addition to our related podcast episodes, there are links to Professional VMware BrownBag, vSoup, VMware’s own Communities Podcast and more. Be sure to visit this page or subscribe to get updates.

For the Veeam Community Podcast, the best way to keep up to date is to set up a subscription through iTunes, MyGoogle, RSS or on the Podbean site.

Recently, I gave my first webinar with Veeam, “5 New ways to use SureBackup”. This webinar focused on being able to use native functionality of Veeam Backup & Replication to save time and avoid problems in your vSphere environment. SureBackup is part of vPower, which is Veeam’s vision for virtualization-powered data protection. We zeroed in on SureBackup’s capabilities to provide a functional virtual machine by booting from the Veeam backup file in the Virtual Lab. The webinar is now available for replay and the slides are available for download.
More >

TechTarget’s SearchServerVirtualization.com has released the Products of the Year 2010 winners, and Veeam received the gold award in two categories! This is yet another announcement in what has has become a record year for Veeam in terms of awards.

Veeam Backup and Replication v5 was selected as the gold award winner for the backup and storage category. This may sound familiar, as Veeam Backup and Replication version 4 received the same distinction in 2009. The Product of the Year page states this about important features for backup and storage for virtualization:

De-duplication, snapshots and shorter virtual machine recovery times are a few of the most important capabilities these products offer.

Not to be outdone, Veeam ONE was selected as the gold award winner for the virtualization management category. The Product of the Year page states this about important features for virtualization management for virtualized environments:

This year's winners in the virtualization management category address monitoring needs, capacity management, the virtual network and better cost models.

This is great news, and thank you to TechTarget and the virtualization community for a wonderful year!

There are always a lot of questions around the larger transition to VMware ESXi for the underlying hypervisor. When ESXi was released in late 2007, a lot of questions were raised about how it will exist alongside the existing hypervisor- ESX. Those questions are answered, and ESXi is the hypervisor that will remain. While the official name of ESXi is now VMware vSphere Hypervisor, I still want to call it ESXi. The long name is generally reserved for the free installation of ESXi, but hey old habits are hard to break.

In Veeam Backup and Replication v5, there are only a few considerations for deciding between VMware ESX and ESXi. Generally speaking, Veeam Backup and Replication v5 offers full support for licensed ESXi installations. This is due to the fact that once ESXi is licensed to communicate with the vCenter Server, the full suite of management agents become active as they are licensed with vCenter.

The one caveat of how ESXi differs from ESX in terms of Veeam Backup and Replication v5 is support for host as a direct backup target. In the User Guide, the following statement may raise a number of questions:

However, at this time you cannot select ESXi as a backup target — as it is possible to do with “full” ESX servers.

This is due to how the data is moved from the host to the backup file. With ESX, it is possible however to make a backup from one ESX host to another directly on the VMFS datastore. This is loosely equivalent to the replication capability that goes directly to a VMFS datastore. However, Replication capabilities can go directly to a VMFS datastore on ESXi.

Let me be very clear, backups can exist on ESXi; but only to locations accessible to the Veeam Backup and Replication server. Most frequently, this is a local drive on the server or a network resource that it can access directly. Writing directly to a VMFS volume isn’t exactly that useful either. Many users frequently want to offload backup files to tape, and if the backup files reside on a VMFS datastore; they are less accessible to anything that can move them to tape.

The message we get from VMware is to get moving to ESXi. I’ve adopted it in my virtualization practice with success, and Veeam Backup and Replication can support it. If you have any comments about ESXi’s support for Veeam Backup and Replication; share them below and let’s talk about it.